My First Expert Win!

The Game

I went online to check the pairings and after seeing my pairing, I refreshed the screen and made sure that I was seeing straight. I was paired up against an expert! A new up-and-coming expert named Om Mishra. Om was 2021 and I went online to do some preparation as soon as I saw the pairing. Little did I know that it would prove much harder to prepare against him since he was so secretive. I ditched the plan of preparing and just ate my orange chicken by myself.

The Opening

We both knew the first few moves of the line and he was playing moves pretty slowly like in the following position, he took 1.5 minutes just to play b3.
Then he spent three whole minutes just to play the move Rc1.

The Middlegame

The middlegame mostly just consisted of a couple of trades here and there a few knight rotations on my side and a rook maneuver until we got the following position:
Then he traded his bishop for my knight and then:

Here I know Bf6 fails but both me and him thought it worked and he ended up playing:
I seized the opportunity and then we went to the endgame with this position.

The Endgame

After achieving this position, I immediately brought my king over to try and gobble up the d-pawn which happened. Then, I went for a sneaky trick. We reached this position and I had a sneaky little move in mind.

Here I played the brilliant move h5!! He took it and then...

f5!
The culmination of all my ideas, the final mating net, he would either die in it or lose a bunch of material.
He ended up choosing the give up a bunch of material option and I mated him on move 52.

Ending Thoughts

Beating someone much higher feels awesome. Chess is about the memories that you make and at the end of the day, your rating shouldn't affect your gameplay since it's just a number. I had a great time at nationals and hope to be back again!

PS. If you are still reading, like this blog for more! :)