Going well...

It's fair to say it's going well for me here in Saarbrücken, Germany at the Bitburger Open 2010.

Yesterday I had a great win against Yi Lu from China who is a quality player, proven by the fact he won this tournament in 2007 and has many other great results. He used to be ranked around 20 in the world before China stopped sending him to any tournaments, so now he's trying to work his way back up. Fortunately I managed to stop his march towards top of the ranking yesterday in what was a splendid match.

I was fighting hard all the way through and tried to stick to my gameplan all the way, even when I was down in large parts of the first two sets. It wasn't easy to do though as I had to be really patient, which isn't exactly what I'm usually best at :) But yesterday it paid off and from being one set down and 15-12 down in the second I got in control of the match and played amazing from there on in. At 20-11 in the third set he played a few good points and I missed a golden opportunity to wrap up the match, so I got a little nervous (ok actually I got very nervous), but finally at 20-18 he made a mistake and I could celebrate a good win.


All this means I'm now in my first ever Grand Prix Gold semifinal. My opponent today will be a good friend of mine, Petr Koukal Czech no. 1. It's also his first semifinal at this level, so it's a big match for both of us. Making it to the final will be the best result ever for both of us, actually I think making the semifinal already is. So you can all imagine that we are both pretty exited about this match.

We have had a few good matches against each other before, the last time being in Swedish International back in January, where Petr came out on top of an epic 3-set battle. So today I will be looking for revenge, which is actually the third time in this tournament for me. The first two times I got it, so I might as well grap number 3 also ;)

The match will be played at 16.50 CET and can be streamed from the official tournament website.

I probably won't update this site again until tuesday or wednesday as I also have a teammatch to play when I return home on monday. But you can follow my progress and thoughts on my facebook fansite, where I post short quick updates.

That will be it for now, hoping to put in a great performance in a few hours.

Thanks for reading and supporting,

HK