The Strangest Position I’ve Ever Played | Road to GM, Game 68

My game against WGM Voiska played in round 2 in Gradište Open 2019. After 4 moves, we were in a position I’ve never seen before and didn’t understand!

Tomic S. (1910) vs WGM Voiska M. (2218)
Gradište Open 2019, Round 2, 06/25/2019, Modern Defense

Gradište Open is the first tournament I played since switching to chess full time. I decided to go a while back because a club mate asked me to go with him. It was also much cheaper than any other tournament I could have gone to.

In the end, my mate didn’t go. I went alone. I stayed at a private house which belongs to a local man. I had a room and shared the bathroom with three more people. It was extremely hot there and there were loads of mosquitos and flies (and other beasts too).

The tournament took place in a small village in the east of Croatia. I am used to places like that, but playing tournaments there is tough. There was no wifi, one bar, one bakery, a shop. Not much to do for food, and nothing to do in general. Which is good because I wanted to focus on chess, but combined with the fact that I couldn’t bear staying in my room and had to choose between fresh air and animals, it was tough.

So from now on I will play tournaments during which I can stay at normal places with normal conditions. This was also a tough playing schedule (3 days with double rounds), so I feel that I could have done better had I been in a normal hotel without distractions.

In round 1 I got (unluckily) paired against a player without an elo rating. So when I won I got no rating points. This was my round 2 game. So from playing an unrated player to playing a WGM.

And the game was completely mad! We played a variation of the Modern which I’ve never seen before. She played c6 followed by c5 and was better! With black! And I made no big mistakes.

Somehow I managed to defend and survive her attack, but got a worse endgame. Nevertheless, I won a pawn and had a draw at least. And then I played an incredibly bad move…

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