Missing out on the Hong Bao...by Junior Tay

At the recently concluded Hong Bao Rapid, an extremely off form Tan Weiliang had to dig in hard to make 3/3, overcoming Heng Zheng Kai in an absolutely drawn Rook and Pawn ending thanks to the clock and even managed to smoke out Marcus Chen from a totally lost position. He proceeded to allow Sarawakian veteran Lim Kian Hua a one mover Knight fork which snared his Queen (Weiliang was two pawns up at that juncture). And yet, in Round 5, he had to face a tough opponent in Jarred Neubronner and here Weiliang decided that enough was enough. He eschewed a draw and launched quite an astounding attack. (Annotations from Weiliang). After a clinical and careful victory over Reinhart Sellmair in Round 6, Weiliang once again (like in the Kickoff Rapid 2013 final round) set up a juicy encounter against IM Luis Chiong again for a winner takes big 'angpow' game. A hard fought tussle ensued and just when the game was about to peter into a likely draw (see Weiliang's annotations), disaster struck... One thing to note about Weiliang's curiously patchy performance was that the day before , he had spent half the day on chess training. Hence his poor form came as a big surprise to him. After all, we should get better from more training, shouldn't we? I guess there's such a thing as 'over-training' which cost Weiliang his Hong Bao last week....