First of all I want to point out that this is more or less my
personal account of the tournament. Other participants might have had different experience and lessons, so please dont take it as
Unified Voice of the Estonian Team 
As Marko wrote before - we had some really great results on those turnaments - specially Lauri, who won bronze in restricted step Push-hands in by all means the largest weight category of the competition.
Also the St. Petersburg is really beautiful city and those of us who had a chance to come earlier had some time to explore this great city of the once great imerium...
On the downside - the tournament organization was at best chaotic. There were occational mixups with weight categories, Constant lagging of the individual competitions and the fact that nobody seemed to know anything was sometimes frustrsating, but mostly mind-numbing.
There was no doctor - just a lady in a green dress who openly admitted that she knows notng of the medicine and who had some reserve of bandages and ice (Marko had a rather serious injury on his first match, when he fell on his shoulder and one of the contestants pulled his shoulder back into the joint)
Anyway - as frustrating and chaoic as the tournament organisation was, it was still quite a good experience for those of us who participated. Although Laoshr did warn us against the kind of push-hands we might encounter on the tournament and at least theoretically i was ready for that, there is still a distinct difference between knowing what is going on and actually realizing it in the ring.
Quite frankly (and expectedly) - I got beaten. Badly beaten:)
After the very first match I realized that I was no match in that kind of bulldozer-style pushing that seemed to be the dominating style of the tournament. I tried for couple of times to answer with the same agressive buldozer technique, but soon enough I quit doing that since the only result of that approach was that I was wasting lot of my energy on something that did not work for me.
After the second match I resolved to just doing the best taiji I could remember in the ring (which was not so good, I must admit). My reasoning being that if I lose or win, it has to have something to do with my taiji skill (or lack thereof), not my strength or speed. This strategy seemed to start paying off on my few last matches, where I started to have little more control over myself and even managed to pull few really nice
rollback-type-of-things .
Anyway - I liked the experience - it taught me a lot about my mistakes (which I had in abundance) and showed me where I fail most critically.
A good point from a contestant was that it is good to participate in these tournaments, because Your fellow classmate, trying to do "good taiji", will propably never exploit your every weakness in a way an opponent on the tournament will. The classmate will usually not try to "get you, what ever it takes".
A related thought is that whenever we practice applications or do pair-work, the one who is feeding should watch that he/she is not decieving the duifang by gently going along in whatever direction the duifang rolls off or pulls the attacker, thus giving a false impression to the duifang that his technique is perfect when in reality it is not.
