CHAPTER 31: BOUNCE BACK

The next two days went pretty quickly, and just as Sheva expected before the tournament even began, his only opponent here should be Claudia, and the other lowly-rated players in this section were not enough to force him into a difficult situation. True enough, he managed to win his next two games pretty neatly, putting his name at the top of the table, with only three more players having an invincible record for the first three rounds.

His second opponent turned out to be another local boy, this time a little bit older. He was about twelve years old, the same age as Claudia, and just like the last time, Sheva still had a hard time pronouncing the Vietnamese name of his opponent.

The boy had a better grasp of the basic skill and learned a little bit more theory compared to the first boy that Sheva faced. However, once Sheva started flipping the table and went into a dark, tactical territory, the boy had a hard time adapting, and in the end, Sheva managed to capitalize on the advantage he built over time to win the game.

As for the third opponent, it was a middle-aged man from Thailand, a pretty rare occasion in such a lowly-rated tournament. After all, those old men with the rating below 2000 usually only played for fun in their own country, never having any thought or the drive for adventure to the tournament abroad, so Sheva paid more attention to him.

True enough, the old man was proven to be tough, going straight off the theory to catch him off guard while also playing aggressively, trying to overwhelm his defense. Sheva didn’t know about it right now, but later, he would find out that this was the style of those who learned chess from the street, from the corner of a dirty market where a bunch of jobless old men would gather and bet their money for a game or two.

Still, just like those who were raised in the street, the old man might have a wild playstyle, but it backfired pretty quickly as he left so many holes back in his defense. Sheva didn’t even need to take a second glance, counterattacking the opponent mercilessly until he was up to a full rook and bishop. It only took about thirty minutes, and the man finally couldn’t bear staying in this hopeless game before he decided to resign, giving Sheva the third point of the tournament.

Coincidentally enough, Claudia also had the same exact point here. She managed to win three out of her first three games, not giving any mercy toward her opponents. She even beat her next two opponents faster than Sheva, making her feel smug whenever she was talking to him. Sheva just snorted, thinking that she was just being a brat.

Still, Sheva was a man who treated everyone equally. If Claudia decided to be a brat, he wouldn’t care too much about his dignity before putting him on the same page as her, annoying the hell out of the girl by acting the same way here. He kept bragging about how even though they had the same points, it was still Sheva who was in the first position.

Yeah, if the point between two players was the same, there were a lot of ways to determine who was in the higher position, and honestly, Sheva didn’t really understand about it. However, he knew that because he was an unrated player here and had to play against the far higher-rated opponents compared to Claudia, he had the edge in this tournament, enough to make her fume whenever Sheva mentioned it.

As for Anna, after the tough defeat in the first round, she managed to bounce back, forcing a draw against the local rising star after a long and difficult battle for more than four hours before finally winning her first game in this tournament by beating an old International Master from Mongolia whose rating had been down far below 2300. At least, the two results were enough to cover the rating loss she suffered from the first game.

Now that three days had finally passed, tension started to ebb away from everyone’s shoulders as they all found themselves sitting together in a small family restaurant near the hotel they lived in, enjoying the dinner peacefully.

"So, are you ready for tomorrow, Shev?" Bagas suddenly asked out of nowhere, startling Sheva.

"Um? What is going on tomorrow?" Sheva asked, not knowing why Bagas asked this question when he hadn’t done so in the last two days. What he didn’t expect, though, was for him to receive the ’are you an idiot?’ stares from everyone else. "What? It is a valid question!" He tried to defend himself.

"You are a clueless idiot, aren’t you?" Claudia snorted, forking another chunk of meat to her mouth. Sheva narrowed his eyes dangerously, which was enough to make the little girl nervous.

"Don’t start now, you two." Anna couldn’t help but sigh, getting tired of their cat-and-dog antic. "Also, you should’ve started searching for any information about the tournament, Sheva. Tomorrow is the double-header day." She said with a disapproving tone.

"The double-header day?" Sheva turned around at Bagas, waiting for his best friend’s explanation.

"It is basically when the organizer puts two rounds in the same day, in the early morning and the late evening," Bagas explained. "This is the day when most of the low-rated players would suffer since they were not ready for the physical toll it would take to spend the entire day playing chess. So, you better get ready, okay?"

Sheva frowned, could see that it would happen tomorrow. After playing for the first three rounds, he finally started realizing how tiring this standard format was, from being forced to sit down for about three hours and spending most of the time thinking about chess, nothing more and nothing less. He couldn’t imagine how it would feel to have to do that twice in one day.

"Also..." Claudia suddenly added, giving Sheva a bad feeling about what she was going to say. "Since we both have the same point, get ready. There is a big chance that we will play against each other, so don’t hold back on me, ne?"