The Raffles Cup inter-college Chinese chess championships finally ended today. It was sad that our sch din win and we only got 4th. We were close to getting into the top 3, just missing by a little. For the Blitz (speed chess) i could say that we were unlucky that none of us got it, (as from chess blog, none of us cat-highs got it). haha sad case.

Many a times i have pondered over the topic, will i still play chess in future? I still vaguely rmb when speaking to my fren (zhuang yong), that when i was in secondary sch, i ever said things like: i'll nvr quit chess in my life. haha now i guess i'm alr the total opposite. i have lost my conviction for chinese chess as well as the motivation. In the past i used to train so hard that every time before competition i really train for a whole week, morning to night until i sleep. that was even more intense then my studies, i used to mug so many chess manuals n online forums until i totally felt that i improved. haha nowadays i dun even touch chess at home.

With the mentality that i was nvr gg to play chess in my life anymore, today's last blitz game could very well be my final game in tournament. It was a little agonising to lose one's final game. However i could only say my opponent was more prepared than i was, he moved his opening so fast which was so pressuring that even i could not take it. I fumbled and move wrongly, losing the game. I got 11th which was some places from the top 8 which reveived prizes. Overall in Raffles Cup for team event, i had 3draws 4 wins. For blitz i had 1 lose, 5 wins, 1 lose. (in order of games played)

The first day of Rcup was very much the first time i was playing chess on a serious note after so long. As a result i couldn't kill my opponents as i was like without any weapons, and the matches ended up in draws. After which the very first game i lose to the HCI person, haha was a little stunned as i couldn't switch from slow game to blitz so easily but picked up slowly. There was a game yesterday which was the second day.

In one of the blitz games, i played with my opponent, the game was so intensifying when so many ppl was watching as we both barely had any time left. ( i had less like abt less than 30s) den he was also very kan cheong, we played so aggressively that i simply moved the eaten-up pieces on the left of my table to the adjacent table without caring that most of it fell to the floor. At the end i tot was a kill and i stopped the clock and tell him "xie xie, sha qi" (thanks, its a kill) n i shook his hand, he totally believed it and i won that game liddat. When i heard from my senior who saw it from behind, he told me it was no kill n i CONNED him. haha! but he believe n concede ma, so i won. haha it was to messy alr n my aggressiveness n my total belief that i killed him convinced him that it was a kill. haha

In this Rcup's team games i also had thoughts. I would really really recall the times when in Cat-high team we had (KMK, SYD, ZZY, ME and TYL) the team was totally imba! haha i believe that when other schs heard they were facing us at that point of time they'd have thoughts of "wow, we're gonna lose". haha but now as wat happened to our seniors the team split to other schs and our strengths diminished. I guess thats wat happens, even in the case of our seniors when they were even more imba, when they split, the strengths of their teams diminished too. Sad isn't it. I sometimes think of cat-high's chess as quite prestigious, over the years the name our seniors and us created, its smth worth mentioning. Its almost like a bloodline but in recent years our juniors aren't getting as much from us den deir peers so i guess tts y dere starting to lose out. Its like the movies when shifus impart skills to their disciples the disciples usually get ard 9/10 of wat they have, so tts y skills always diminish, but i guess thats inevitable. And wats more the team from chs will get split up when the chs peeps go to jc, so the skills' get worst! haha a consolation that i saw from the schs is that chs is like an advanced bloodline, so in almost every sch the cat highs go, they dun fail to dominate their chess team, haha better than nth rite. haha

"A person is nothing without his team" haha a realisation from my years of playing chess. Although 6 yrs is not very long, i may nvr get to touch chess agn.