(no subject)

From a really good four-mile run this morning to a dramatic Blazers victory tonight, this day has been completely awesome.

In between the two abovementioned items, my team won the Portland Regional Open Swiss today. That is kind of a big deal.

I've won Swisses before, with this team, even, and I've won events that were arguably tougher than this one, but this was LEGIT. A lot of previous wins, I've felt like I was riding someone's coattails, but this event, I fucking played my ass off. Our teammates were solid all day, too, but they are newer players and everyone will agree that my partnership was the stronger one. So this is a win where I'm 100% confident I carried my weight. And it was an open event with a strong field at a large regional. It feels fucking great. And nationals are in three weeks.

After the game, a good friend and sometimes partner of mine came up to me to ask how we did. I told him we won the event. He said congratulations, and from there, the conversation went like this:
Me: Thanks!
Him: Great win! Pretty unexpected, but great win!
Me: Excuse me?
Him: There are a LOT of good teams in this field.
Me: Yep. And we're one of them.
Him: Come on. Be realistic.
Me: Um, DUDE? NOT COOL. I think it is pretty realistic when we WIN THE FUCKING EVENT.
Him: Sorry. It's just, ugh. Sorry. You should feel good about this win.
Me: And I do, but you're making me feel less good about it, so fuck off for now please.

He's a good friend, and he's really, really awkward, and I know he didn't mean to be a complete asshole, but he was kind of a complete asshole. Our partnership is more or less over -- we didn't gel well because we each have very different philosophies, but when we did play, we usually did quite well. He's just moved on to partners who are more willing to play his system, and who he thinks are better than I am. And that's fine. He can think that. I've been on a fucking roll lately, and I feel really good about where my game is now. Of course I make stupid mistakes sometimes and I've got a lot of room for improvement, but even the very best players make mistakes ALL THE TIME. This game is not completely solvable; you can just get asymptotically closer to perfect.  And I feel like I'm getting to the place now where the distance between me and the very best players is a LOT smaller than it has been. A lot of local players haven't seen me play much because all of my partners are non-locals, but I've had a string of really solid wins, and it's past flukey. So there's a big part of me that really enjoys proving the underestimators wrong. Chris can find it unexpected that I won this time, but my plan is for it to keep happening :)