CHAPTER 78: THE SUMMARY OF THE THIRD AND FOURTH DAY OF THE TOURNAMENT!

The next two days passed quickly, and Sheva had a blast at the tournament. He maintained his perfect record, winning all four games with ease. The boy continued his good record after playing a near-perfect tournament in Hanoi and is on track to repeat or even get the perfect result in this tournament.

After beating Husnaini in the second round, he got paired against a woman slightly older than him with an ELO rating of 2110. Honestly, Sheva was interested in her game. After all, the three girls he knew in this game were all pretty incredible: Anna, Claudia, and Laysa. He wondered whether the woman’s level was as high as theirs or not.

Unfortunately, he left the game in disappointment. Yeah, in the end, he still won the game. But the process was quite annoying. The woman made one mistake after another, kept pushing herself to the edge of the cliff. Hell, Sheva didn’t even have to do anything, just watching from the sideline as the woman tried to kill herself. In the end, she resigned after he managed to force an unequal exchange, with him getting her queen in return for his knight.

Still, Sheva wouldn’t complain about this match for too much. After all, the woman’s rating was 2108, and the win over her was enough to give him another 30+ ELO rating points.

Then came the fourth day, and he had to face a tough opponent from Belgium, Yansen, with an ELO rating of 2221. Yeah, somehow, a few foreign players coming from a far country got lost and joined a low-rated tournament held in Indonesia like this. Yansen wasn’t the only foreign player in this section, but he was definitely the best one here. The man was the third-seeded player in this category, and he was really difficult to handle.

Holding white pieces, the man, Yansen, went for the Reti Opening, a system that Sheva had never seen before. It was quite annoying to go blindly into a game like this, but he had to face the consequences of his lack of preparation. In the end, Sheva burned almost half of his time thinking of every movement he should make in the opening stage. Not the wisest decision, but the boy was confident he could keep up in the middle and endgame later.

It was quite scary to see Yansen rushing forward from the queenside, not even giving Sheva any time to breathe. However, the boy managed to cover all the leaks in his defense, exchanging a lot of pieces that were ready to attack him, and somehow, turning the tables around. Yeah, just in the twentieth move, all the advantages Yansen gained earlier were gone, and now, it was Sheva who was probing his opponent’s kingside.

In the end, Sheva finally managed to force a queen’s exchange, and with two passed pawns on the C and D file reigning freely, Yansen finally resigned, giving Sheva his fourth point of the tournament. Not only that, the win also gave the boy an additional 35 ELO rating points, and in total, he had already gained around 134 ELO rating points, catapulting his rating to get through the threshold of 2000 in a blink.

Of course, this was an event worth celebrating. However, Sheva didn’t want to jinx everything here, especially when he still wanted to win. So, he delayed the celebratory party for later, deciding to focus on the tournament first before anything else happened. Now, he was sharing the first position of the tournament with three other players: the top-seeded one, the fifth on the initial ranking, and Claudia.

Yeah, it wasn’t just him who started the tournament with a bang. The little girl also dominated all of her opponents in the first four days of the tournament. Even though her first two opponents were just small fries, starting from the third round, the girl went crazy by beating the fourth-seeded player in just 13 moves. After that, another player with the rating of 2121 became her victim as she went berserk, killing everything that was on her way.

Just like Sheva, she also managed to cross the threshold of 2000 easily. Hell, with the additional 65 ELO rating points, she was only a few steps away from crossing 2100 rating, and it wasn’t impossible for her to achieve that in this tournament.

Those two—Sheva and Claudia—really became the dark horses in this section, killing all of their opponents left and right without mercy. They both were topping the tournament, and if somehow, even though the probability was minuscule, they managed to beat their opponents in the next round, those two would have to face against each other in the sixth round, just like how they went in the Hanoi Tournament a few weeks ago.

However, right now, they both didn’t look like they were having a good time. Yeah, they both could be found sitting together in silence, with Sheva smiling wryly as he didn’t know how to handle this situation, while Claudia herself was in a pretty violent mood. Of course, this all happened because, unlike them, Anna had probably had one of the worst tournaments in her life. The girl herself also sat in front of them, depressingly, finding it hard to lift her mood.

Yeah, after getting beaten by Master Susanto, the girl somehow managed to force a draw result from the IM Yoseph Taher. However, the next two games went pretty disastrously for her, as she didn’t even have a chance against the Malaysian IM Li Tian Yeoh and the Azerbaijani genius Suleymanli Aydin. Out of her first four games, she only gained half a point, putting her in last place in the pack.

It was understandable that the girl would be depressed after a series of bad results like this. However, that didn’t mean Sheva liked it even for a second, especially since he was the one everyone pushed to handle those girls. He still grumbled inwardly at those members of the club who left him alone with two timebombs here, forcing him to sacrifice. Still, he knew that spending the rest of the evening in silence like this would be a waste of time, so he decided to try something here.

The boy picked up a chessboard from his bag and said to Anna, "Want to play a game?"