By Andy Dong
With the ranking of FIDE 2044, USCF 2078, you are a successful chess player with the title of National master. The Nationals are coming up and you decide to join. You start your training. What you now do every day is eat breakfast, train, lunch, train, dinner, train. Two weeks later you are ready, confident, and a little bit worried. As you enter the building, you plop your stuff on a table and go over to the pairings table. It has not been posted yet, so you decide to train. After about 30 minutes you hear a voice yelling “Pairings are up!” You rush over and find your name. You see that you are paired with an International master. You have been assigned the white pieces. You head over to your table and wait. Your opponent shows up. You take a deep breath and start to play. After a few moves you look at the board and you are slightly worse. Your opponent is smirking at you. You manage to hold on until suddenly your opponent makes a bad move. You take advantage of the move and win the game. In the next games of the tournament, your confidence and gameplay crush the people you are playing until you play a Grandmaster in the last round. You and your opponent play for 5 hours and you are really tired. Your opponent gets careless and blunders. You are super tired but manage to finish off the game and win!