CHAPTER 32: THE DOUBLE HEADER DAY

It was early morning the next day, and Sheva found himself looking at himself in front of the mirror in his hotel room. He still felt uncomfortable wearing this kind of formal attire, having never had any need to do so before. However, chess tournaments have always had strict and complicated rules regarding the attire that players could wear, and the safest bet was always to wear formal attire. Fortunately, his mother still saved most of his father’s wardrobe, including what he usually wore on a formal occasion, so he didn’t have to buy it at all.

"Shev, why are you so slow?!" Bagas’s voice suddenly could be heard from the outside of the room Sheva was in, the tone was a little bit impatient. "Don’t hog the bathroom by yourself! I also need to take a bath, you know?!" The fat boy shouted from the outside.

"Just wait a little bit!" Sheva shouted back, starting to grumble about how nosy the boy was. "For fuck’s sake, I should’ve asked Master Irfan for a single-bedroom. What a noisy fatty."

"I can hear you, you know?!"

"Oh, shut up!"

Yeah, for this trip, Sheva spent his night in the same hotel room as Bagas. At first, he decided to choose this because the boy had never gone to a foreign country even for once, and he was afraid that he would embarrass himself over something silly. He came to regret that decision, though, as not only was his fear unreasonable, but Bagas turned out to be such a noisy person when it came to the bathroom.

After five more minutes, Sheva finally came out, albeit with a little bad mood, glaring at Bagas who was doing the same. They both exchanged rude hand gestures for a moment before the fat boy barged into the bathroom quickly, ignoring Sheva who stood still in front of the door,

It was still quite early in the morning, yet they both had already awoken by the alarm they set. It was important for them to wake up this early today, especially for Sheva. After all, unlike yesterday, when the game started at 11 A.M. local time, today, two games would be jam-packed, so the start of the first game was far earlier than usual, at 8 in the morning.

After getting himself prepared, Sheva waited for Bagas to finish his morning routine while enjoying a piece of a sandwich that he brought from the minimarket close to the hotel yesterday. Honestly, this was probably the best part of this travelling experience. In Indonesia, a savory sandwich wasn’t that popular. The pastry would always come with so much sweetness, making it unbearable to eat for someone who was unkeen toward sugar like him. The first time Sheva found that the minimarket sold the chicken grilled sandwich, he was hooked, secretly praying that there would be a shop that would sell this kind of sandwich near his home.

While doing so, of course, Sheva didn’t forget to prepare himself for the game. For the fourth round, he would be assigned to table 2, facing a girl from the Philippines, Gloria Divata. She was two years older than Sheva with an ELO rating of 1843, the seventh seed of the tournament. Just like him, the girl also had a perfect record here, winning three out of the first three games in this tournament.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know a lot about the girl’s playing style, so he was practically going blindly into the match. However, this was always the case for the first three rounds, so he didn’t really care about it. Right now, he was just trying to check more on his opening repertoire and thinking about what kind of approach he should use in the next game.

’By now, most of the players who are serious about this tournament should’ve known about my aggressive style already, so it is no use to change it into a safe one just to aim for a quick and boring draw. No, what I need to do right now is to beat the shit out of everyone else and leave a strong impression, strong enough to make Master Irfan consider sending me out for this kind of tournament again more regularly without even having to win the internal tournament.’

Yeah, at this time, Sheva had already thought about his future after this tournament, and even if he won this entire thing, it wouldn’t make a big splash, considering that this was just a tournament for those whose rating was under 2000. No, he had to do more here, and the only thing that the boy could think about was to sweep the entire tournament under his bag, winning everything as an unrated player. It was unprecedented, and once something like that happened, he bet that Irfan would be tempted to send him more to the stronger tournament abroad.

After a while, Bagas finally finished his doing, and later, they both went out to the venue together for the fourth round of the tournament. There, they both saw Anna, Claudia, and Irfan gathering in front of the door with two more people whose faces told Sheva that they were the same Indonesian player as him.

"Sheva, Bagas, you are finally here!" Irfan waved his hand excitedly. "Here, let me introduce two legendary people to you. They are Grandmaster Susanto Megaranto and Grandmaster Utut Ardianto, my old teachers!"

Bagas blinked for a moment, not quite understanding the two people’s high status yet. However, Sheva, who had already learned about the general situation of chess in Indonesia, was stunned, not expecting to see two big shots appear in front of him like this.

Yeah, those two were probably the two strongest chess players that Indonesia had ever given birth to. Utut Ardianto was an old man who was about to touch the age of 60 and had been retiring from professional chess for a long time, yet in his heyday, he was one of the strongest chess players in Asia.As for Susanto Megaranto, even though his performance had been declining in the last couple of years, the man was still the highest-rated chess player in Indonesia.He was also the captain of the national team who managed to make a huge splash together with Irfan a few years ago by beating the Philippines before getting beaten by Vietnam at that time.

"So, you are Adrian Sheva, huh? Irfan has been bragging about your talent for a while." Megaranto smiled warmly at him, not even caring about how stunned Sheva was. "Try to win your match this round, okay? I really want to see your game against Claudia later."