Michael Jackson Memorial Tournament: Analysis Medley

I've recently watched the movie This Is It, and I must tell it was well beyond my expectations. I was afraid they would make it all MTV and Hollywood style, but that was exactly what it wasn't. You could feel the love for and of Jackson, you could immediately understand he was in good hands. There was nothing but the concert, the beauty which he was working so hard to share with the world. I'm sad...

Having seen the movie, I decided to take this memorial tournament more seriously and make an analysis post of some interesting games. To be frank, the opposition was mainly very weak, and most of the games aren't worth sharing and analyzing. I was initially going for the number 2 spot on this round, which was already pretty challenging, but winning one game and having a won position in the other against 2 of my main rivals who I thought would be fighting for the 2nd spot just like I was, I think I could make a go for the no1 spot.

Anyway, let's move on to the games.

This first one is against the top guy, TagaDanoaCity. He is been up around 2400 once, and is still around 2300. He just ripped our group apart. I mean, he crushed everybody black&white, he just didn't lose a point. Having seen that before our first game had even reached the middlegame, I had lost all my hopes for advancing to the next round (only the no.1 spot was advancing). Well that was actually wrong, because with the way things are going, I could probably aim for a rating above 2200 here once my ongoing games are finished. So in reality I had pretty good chances too, but my initial psychology played it's role and I lost the game.

Here's another interesting game. This one is against luqmaan, he is one of the lower rated players of the group but he's pretty decent, he won against the 2nd highest rated player in the group, so I had to keep an eye on him. There are some interesting tactics in this game.

This 3rd game I found interesting was against TheAOD, and it's the second game in the tournament that I got very close to losing. I just saw a tactical opportunity and went for it, before trying to evaluate the resulting position of the sequence. Now that was a mistake, but luckily I wasn't punished. I made another game losing blunder later, this time on more positional grounds, but that went unnoticed too. Lucky me.

This game was against dethwing, one of the 3 higher rated players of the group other than me, and I thought he was one of my main rivals. I felt like I had to secure the 2nd spot at the very least, so took this game very seriously. It was an interesting fight where my opponent made pawn sacrifice but couldn't bring the follow up correctly. 

Hope you enjoyed the analysis, I tried to do my best to go deep when necessary and make things easy to understand where possible. I would appreciate any feedback. Bye!