I end­ed up los­ing all my match­es yes­ter­day. Out of 18 games, I won three. Two match­es should have been easy wins, and one was tied at 2 games, 12 points. I get too ner­vous when I’m play­ing new peo­ple. I’m not quite used to the entire idea of com­pet­ing, espe­cial­ly for rank, espe­cial­ly with oth­er peo­ple depend­ing on me. My team­mates told me that it was notice­ably affect­ing my per­for­mance because it seemed as if my shoul­ders were stiff and I was try­ing too hard. I’ll be accus­tomed to every­thing even­tu­al­ly.

I have anoth­er five hour league meet today. My team is matched up against two oth­er teams of inter­me­di­ate play­ers. When I first played in the league at the begin­ning of the year I had no hope of beat­ing these peo­ple, but now I’m not sure. I think that if I can con­cen­trate well enough, and play smart enough, I’ll have a good chance. The prob­lem is that being ner­vous always puts me at a dis­ad­van­tage; I usu­al­ly only win when I’m calm and focused. I’ve only played two of the sev­en play­ers, so there’ll def­i­nite­ly be some styles that I’m not used to, and that’s what scares me. Either way, it’ll be good expe­ri­ence.