With the state of the world such as it is (not to mention the arrival of my son), I was sad to miss Gen Con in Indianapolis this fall, but happy to be able to claim participation in Gen Con Online once again this year, this time in the form of another USTA Tak Tournament.
As it turned out, signups were quite light, and only three of us were on the bracket for the event— and one no-showed. So it was up to PlutoTheBrave and I to duke it out for first and second place.
The matches were short and brutal (I’d played my opponent a couple times before, and knew I had a tough game ahead of me, even without having been absent from playing since early summer). I won’t be going through the effort of embedding commentary, only remarking that for the first, I’ve still not figured out how to make the “Knight Opening” work for me, and I ended up unable to do much over-committed to another 6×6 edge crawl. In the second, 4. d4 was a terrible play and shortly after, I’d realized I had no place for my capstone, who sure enough ended up isolated out of the game by the end, doing me no favors out there.
Still, my losses secured me that coveted second place in the Tournament, and I received this lovely board from USTA made by Bill, the organizer. I’m looking forward to playing a few rounds on here, and more importantly, hope we get to do this again over a table in Indianapolis next year.
