I'm still in a state of shock from the regular season finale of the US Chess League on Wednesday night. In what pretty much summed up our entire season, I lost on time to FM Matthew Hoekstra in a totally winning K+P ending. I'm not going to annotate the game, you can play over it on the USCL site and see that I was winning the entire game. I don't think I've ever been more upset about a loss. Those of you who have been around me after bad losses might find that hard to believe, but I've never wiped the pieces off the board in disgust as I did at the end of that game.

What happened was that normally I play my USCL games using a regular board. I play my move on the board first, then enter it into the computer. When I get short on time, I stop using the board and start playing directly on the computer. However, in this game, because of the 30 second increment, I built my time back up to several minutes and went back to using the board. I guess in my mind I never thought my time would get low again. I'm still not sure where all my time went as most of the moves before the end were fairly obvious and I think I played them quickly. But neither can I believe that I went into a trance for a couple of minutes. Is there a way to get the times off of the ICC? My morbid curiosity wants to know how long I actually had for the final move. When I glanced up at the screen, I saw that my time was ticking down in fractions of a second (which means I had somewhere less than 10 seconds and I couldn't grab the mouse fast enough to play a move (every legal move was winning).

Unfortunately, this game also had the side effect of allowing Carolina into the playoffs instead of Philadelphia.