CHAPTER 41: ANNA’S DETERMINATION!

Meanwhile, in the main hall of the building, Anna also currently had to face the fight of her career. In front of her sat a tanned-skinned boy with thick glasses that she was familiar with. His name was Gerry Mandagi from Samarinda, East Kalimantan, and Anna had a pretty bad record against him.

The first time they fought against each other was probably four years ago. It was at the National School Chess Competition, and they both represented their middle school to fight at the highest stage in the country. At that time, Anna, who was still a freshman, walked confidently like she was the goddess descended on earth, slaughtering every enemy she faced left and right without any mercy. She took the entire tournament by storm, being the biggest sensation in the chess community in the country for a while. However, Gerry Mandagi, who was two years older than her, humbled the girl in the last round, blocking her from winning first place in the tournament. In the end, Gerry managed to win it all, while Anna had to be satisfied with being in third place.

It was quite normal to lose a game like that, especially when the stake was so high. However, Anna didn’t think so. No, she saw the defeat as a humiliation, and she vowed to get back at him and return the favor tenfold whenever they played against each other.

After that, they fought against each other quite often, especially in a decisive match of the tournament. After all, they were still playing in the same junior category, and only a few players with similar ages to them were strong enough to challenge those two in this country.

Their strength were also pretty similar compared to each other. While Gerry had the higher rating, that was only because he had more sponsors to fund him for a good tournament, while Anna herself had to be content with playing in the local tournament, which didn’t affect her rating at all. As for their record against each other, Gerry still had the slight edge with 7 wins, 5 draws, and 5 losses, but no one would think that they were that far off in terms of pure strength.

Still, it had been a while since Anna won against him, and honestly, it started unnerving her. The last time they played against each other was in the junior national tournament, and it went disastrously for her side. At that time, she had already had 5 points out of 7 games, so close to the top of the table. However, the current leader at that time was Gerry with 5.5 points, and the boy didn’t give her a chance at all. In the end, she lost, and it also shut down her chance to win that tournament.

That was why, when Anna found that she was playing in the same category as Gerry, the girl’s determination was burning brighter than ever. Moreover, the stake this time was higher, as she really needed to win this game to get a chance to earn her WGM norm. So, yeah, losing was not an option here, and Anna was ready to do everything she could to win the game.

’Now, let’s see how you would respond to this...’ She thought to herself as the girl made her opening move.

Funnily enough, even though they didn’t rehearse it, Anna went with the exact same opening as what Sheva did against her little sister, the King’s Gambit. Unlike Claudia, who was always a conservative and positional player, though, Anna’s playing style was very similar to Sheva’s, aggressive and always liked to make her opponent uncomfortable. That was why she didn’t mind copying Sheva’s arsenal in this kind of game, believing that Gerry wouldn’t see that coming.

True enough, the boy was taken aback, not expecting Anna to pull the King’s Gambit out of nowhere. He had played against her a lot of times, and this was the first time he had seen her with this opening. It was either Anna adding new things to her repertoire, or she had been saving this for a while to knock him down. Either way, though, the surprise attack was successful, as Gerry was a little bit flustered at his own current position.

’Yes, come on...’ Anna clenched her fist tightly, trying to hide her nervousness. ’Get more nervous, make more mistakes... Once you step on the landmine, I will eat you alive...’

However, unlike Claudia, who was inexperienced handling a surprise attack, Gerry, who already had the FIDE Master title, only got startled for a few seconds, and he regained his composure pretty quickly. Fortunately, since it wasn’t that often for any top players to use the King’s Gambit opening, Gerry didn’t have a lot of knowledge about its variations, so he went with the classical exchange variation, where Anna had been preparing herself for a while.

She developed all of her pieces into a strong and strategic square pretty quickly, starting to pressure Gerry’s king side. The bold strategy that basically was ignoring her own king in order to kill the opponent first was enough to trouble Garry. The boy even paused for more than twenty minutes at one point, trying so hard to think of a solution to get out of the pressure, either by forcing an exchange to balance the situation or initiating a counterattack blindly. Both had their merits, yet the risks also lingered inside the boy’s mind.

"Gerry is hesitating right now." Master Susanto commented seriously as the broadcast shifted into this game. "It is clear that he is not familiar with this opening line. He doesn’t want to castle on the queen’s side, yet doing the opposite would be like going straight to the landmine. He is also hesitating on how to develop his pieces. He doesn’t know how to hide his king. This is going to be a difficult game for our young FIDE Master."

The chat went crazy at Master Susanto’s comment, and Bagas had to work hard to keep an eye on them so that the room was still manageable. Inwardly, though, he didn’t expect that changing the game into Anna’s one would be enough to attract this much attention. It seemed that most viewers also knew about her opponent, and for a moment, there were a lot of debates that he couldn’t really read due to how fast it was in the chat room.

"Still, I cannot believe that Anna goes for the same King’s Gambit as Sheva, though." Irfan’s sigh snapped Bagas from his own thought, and out of politeness, he also turned around at the IM who had a complicated expression. Everyone might not know this, but in his more than fifteen-year chess career, Irfan has only seen a serious player using this opening less than five times, and three of them happened during this month. He didn’t know what kind of feeling he should have now. "Oh, well, your friend is really a bad influence here, Bagas." He smiled wryly, which Bagas just replied with a polite shrug, not wanting to take the blame.

Before the fat boy could make any comeback, though, their attention was snapped once again, as this time, Master Susanto gasped in surprise at the move that Gerry made.

"Oh, no! Gerry is trying to exchange his bishop with Anna’s terrible knight! He should’ve just kept the tension there while also building more pressure on her king’s side! He makes a mistake here!" He yanked his hair in disbelief. "And Anna catches that! She grasps the momentum now! It is her time to knock him back! Can she do that?!"