During my break from work today, I decided to do something I haven't done before. I decided to play Lichess' under 2000 arena for the first time. The only tournament I play are Hive - related tournament except I decided to test my strength against other chess player out there who are not on Hive.
Well it was quite challenging to know that one should never judge a chess player by their elo rating, rather just play well on the board. That was the fate for me in this tournament. I played against some players and I almost lost to a 1700 rated player. Luckily for me, they blundered and I got the win on time.
I played a total of 7 games, 6 wins and a 1 draw from the last game which my opponent offered the draw because it was only 30 seconds or less to the end of the tournament and we need evenly points we could get. In this tournament I came in at 3rd place again just like I did in that second round of the Saturday Hivechess tournament. In Lichess' under 2000 arena, it was a win rate of 86% with berserk rate 0%, since berserk mode was removed from this arena.
In this game, I schooled my opponent on the disadvantage of leaving your king at the center of the board for the sake of grabbing early pawns. It was detrimental to their position as I gained an early space advantage through counter play on their queen from the early parts of the game and this brought about this tactical position. I just sacrificed my rook for a knight because the knight moving to g5 brings about a mating combination that cannot be stopped and that is exactly what happened in the game.
You can use this link to watch how the game ended:
https://lichess.org/FzzYdMiW/white#49
This is the game that gave me the understanding that you should not underestimate an player simply because of their rating. In this game, I play passively and that put me in a very uncomfortable position like the one above. Right from the Grunfeld opening where I missed the move c5 and went for c6 instead, I knew there was something off but I could not find my way back to a better position. Fortunately for me, my opponent missed the final blow, Bb8 which takes me an exchange down with a cramped queenside pawn. In the end I was able to win the game time which caused my opponent to blunder badly.
It was a nice break from work.