Introduction

Why Am I Doing This?

I enjoy writing but have never written a blog before, largely because most of the things I write about are only of personal interest and therefore my writing about them was almost entirely in e-mails to friends. I figured nobody else would be interested. In the past few years my e-mails have mentioned chess more and more, and what I discovered is that my friends aren't interested either. How could they be? Almost none of them play chess at all, and the few who do only play at a very recreational level. I can't blame them if they don't understand when I try to explain why a game I just played was particularly interesting or why I devote so much time to playing this game. So this might be a good outlet for my desire to write about my chess adventures without making my friends bored. Or at least if my e-mails to friends are boring it will be for other reasons.

Who Am I?

Introduction

I'm 52 years old. I trained as a lawyer and worked as one for several years but now work part time at something less prestigious. I'm married and have two children. My USCF rating as of this writing is 1254.

History with chess

Beginnings

I started playing chess around 1990 depending on your definition of the word "playing." It was my senior year as an undergraduate college student. I had a chess playing program for my personal computer at the time that I messed around with occasionally. It was a laughably weak program even by the standards of the day, but against someone who had no idea how to play other than how the pieces moved it was strong enough. It beat me regularly. After a number of games I tried to figure out what the computer was doing that I wasn't doing, and after a number of embarrassing losses one day I finally checkmated the computer. I was jubilant. In triumph I decided to see if my college library had any books about chess and discovered an entire shelf devoted to the subject, so many that I couldn't possibly read them all. I read a number of them, even though almost all of them were too advanced for me to understand. I still learned a lot, such as common openings and that sort of thing.

The following year in law school I joined my university's chess club, where I was the weakest player, but they encouraged me to become a USCF member and play tournaments. I did, and in my first local tournament finished second in the Unrated division. I continued to play tournaments over the next few years.

The next 25 years or so

While I didn't intentionally give up chess, other life events took precedence. I would stop playing for several years and then take it up again for several years, playing in a tournament here or there. I assume online chess existed during most of that time but with rare exceptions I didn't play on the internet. For a couple of years I started and ran a very small local chess club in a small town; I even ran a successful local USCF tournament. After a few years that stopped too, when I had to move to a new town. The cycle repeated itself every few years: I'd play for awhile and enjoy it, but then realized I was not improving and would get frustrated and quit.

The last few years

I'm still in the midst of my most recent reacquaintance with the game. I began regular play on the internet and came to the realization that part of the reason I had not improved as a player was that I had never made a serious concerted effort to study and train. I began to read specifically about improvement and thought process. In addition to occasional tournament play I played many slow games on the internet and analyzed them afterward. I did daily tactics puzzles. I watched Youtube videos about chess, some instructional and some just for fun. I'm still doing all this now.

What will be in this blog and who will want to read it?

Anything related to chess that I want to write about. It might be my efforts to improve; it might be stories of tournaments or games of mine that I find interesting enough to write about; it might just be thoughts about the game. While drafting this initial post I thought of several stories that could be the subject of a blog post, but I'll save those for future entries.

As for who will want to read it, well, it will depend on what I actually write. A master level player isn't going to get any instructional value out of it since they understand the game a lot better than me, but I intend for the blog to be more a journal of my chess experiences rather than instructional. I expect some people will relate to my experiences and enjoy it and others won't, and that's okay.