My story with chess
Submitted by
shadowc on Thu, 08/02/2007 at 6:46am.
I think is fair that I point out what is my involvement with chess.
My father is a pretty good social chess player, although I have no idea what his ranking would be, it is something between 1500 and 1900. When I was 5 years old he taught me the game. I really like it at first, but then, failing to achieve any victory against him, and not wanting to hear his advices, I quickly put it away.
When I was 6 or 7 I attended some Argentinean International Master course. I think at that point (1989, or so) he had just been world champion... Too bad I don't remember his name, hehe. We were all 6 or 7 years old kids and we all learned a little bit about mechanics and the king's opening. It was fun to me, but I quikly felt the course was going too slowly. I use to win almost every match against my mates and the king's opening started to feel like... boring (well, no variations were being taught)!
During the following years in my childhood I played not very much. I used to challenge people at my school, with very little looses. I wasn't very much into learning back then, but into feeding my ego. I kept playing my father and kept loosing though... That was annoying.
At 12, 13, my personality started to shape and change. I became more open minded and more "nice guy" (I could be an ass as a kid). I think I was 14 or 15 when I found a chess club in my home city (I lived in Mar del Plata until 1998). It was a simple café with some chess boards in it, where some old but very childish people would gather to play every day. I started to watch their games, hoping I could play one myself at some point and then it finally striked me, right into my heart.
That group of friends would for some mysterious reason always play the Queen Pawn's opening of which I deeply felt in love. Such aggression, such freedom of choice, such a "go for it" philosophy. Unfortunately they never let me in, I never could play a game, I got upset and I stopped going.
But that served me in a way I was then loving chess. Since then, chess is a game I always wanted to learn deeply, but never found how. I started playing regular matches with my best friend, and we both found ourselves to be quite good opponents, and both improved throughout the years. My father kept utterly undefeatable nevertheless...
At some point in 2000 or 2001, we both started to have more active lives. I became a professional musician (for a short period of time sadly, since it gave me no economic reward and I had to start working on my second passion: computers, in Manhattan). We both traveled and stop seeing each other often and chess was left behind yet another time.
This year I woke up. Being lead in my own company, having so little time for music (art), I remembered something from my past, installed my Chessmaster 9000 into my brand new computer (it's like a baby deep blue, lol, it can calculate 2 million positions per second) and started to play and play.
Surprise became deception, deception became anger, and anger became fury, as I lost one game after another against poorer and poorer opponents... My virtual rating went down to like something ridiculous like 790 and I wondered what had I forgot about chess. I then found the academy.
In the academy I found this... Now I could call "friend" of mine, since he offers so much of himself through his interactive course... Josh Walkzkin academy. I went from the very basic until the very complicated stuff in like 15 days in which I used to spend 8, 9 hours a day listening to his interactive courses and practicing what I was learning. I hardly slept.
I learn that chess is music in a board... I started to see harmony, counter point, orchestration, instrument performance, all those theories translated into their mathematical abstraction in the shape of positional challenges. Now I know I like chess :)
I started to think not consciously but with the artistic and mathematic side of my brain (which works millions of times faster than our brain cortex) to decide the moves. I sometimes never could understand the real explanation for a correct move, since it was kept in my unconscious mind.
I challenged Chessmaster and lost due to a miscalculation (I had the game until like move 25th, wanted to mate and got mated). I put myself into a virtual tournament of people with twice my virtual ranking and ended 3rd. I went to yahoo and almost massacred a 1375 chess player, I traveled to Mar del Plata (now I live in Buenos Aires) and drown my father after I asked him to take back 3 moves which I considered blunders.
My current level is a mystery. I actually can play very good moves when I am concentrated, but if I loose focus for a second I can make the most horrible moves of a child and loose a game. Now I want to learn more, I want to improve, I want to make more courses and play real people. I hope that I can learn a lot here with this amazing community. I am very happy with my improvement but I know that I am light years away from what I would like, so I will be taking all of your advices to make myself a better player, now that I have found my line and my chess personality.