The top 6 boards of the championship were played on digital boards with a live broadcast of the moves, both to an on-site spectators’ lounge and to the Internet and whatever posterity they might find. When I began the tournament seeded 6th and playing on the bottom-most of those 6 boards, I made it my private goal to spend as much of the tournament as possible on those boards. Having made it back up to Board 1 in the 8th round, I realized that even if I lost, I would not drop out of the top 12 players for the championship’s final round, and therefore would remain on the broadcast boards from the event’s start to finish. Wrapping up a tournament at or ahead of where you began it in the rankings is always a good benchmark for success.

So I already felt that I was playing with house money, so to speak, when I came into this game. I didn’t do much preparation, since I’d had a game already that day and Svitlana plays nearly every opening anyway. So I just calmly resolved to keep playing my usual game and to let things fall out how they might. I had no illusions then (and still fewer now) of being a match for Canada’s top female players; however, in a single game, anything might happen!

I did not feel too badly about losing this game, since I certainly had never thought I would ever be playing on the top board in the championship’s second-last round, and the idea of winning the tournament had always been far-fetched. On the long subway ride home, I realized that Svitlana would be playing Yunshan the next morning. If Yunshan were to win that game, then that would open the door for 12-year-old Ashley Qian, the only player with 6.5 points after 8 rounds, to win the tournament outright. And since Ashley had already played all the top seeds, she would likely have a comparably favourable pairing in the last round. Plus, she was due to have the white pieces.

So I went home smiling, with the idea that we might have a truly remarkable champion within the next 16 hours or so. As for myself, if I were to beat whomever I was paired with, and again, if Yunshan beat Svitlana (far from a given outcome, but she would have every motivation to try her hardest), then the three of us would all tie with 7 points each. I certainly wasn’t counting any chickens, but a tie for second behind a prodigy sounded like an excellent outcome to strive for. And a loss would leave me somewhere around where I started out, in about 6th place or so, equal to my seeding, with 6/9, equal to my performance in 2024. Maybe that isn’t exactly the killer-instinct, maximally ambitious outlook of a champion, but I basically felt like the pressure was off. That is, until I actually sat down at the board across from Oksana Golubeva, yet another member of our national team, and the final member of the big top 3 seeds.