I’ve now played more than 20,000 online games since 2019, against players from 208 countries, but connecting over the board is meaningful, and beautiful, in a way that online chess never can be. In Zurich, I played a best of five game against a local on the giant chess boards in Lindenhofplatz, and did the same in Madrid at El Retiro Park. Like football, chess is a universal language. My love of chess grew into a love of spending time with friends and family, catching up over the board and teaching them the game, and the tricks and traps that come with it.Ī good friend also caught the chess bug, and we played on-the-board by the Water of Leith till the early hours one night – a far more sociable event than the dark and dingy online alternative. I joined Edinburgh Chess Club, the world’s second oldest club. Slowly, through learning the Catalan opening theory, the calm and mystique of chess returned. I would focus on learning, not an arbitrary Elo number. I bought them all and deleted both chess apps from my phone. One day, I noticed nine chess books in the window of a local charity shop. I didn’t like the person online chess was making me – online or off it. Doorbells went unanswered and phone calls were missed due to my inability to multitask while playing these matches. When one match ended, a new one would begin. I was no longer learning, instead speedily moving pieces around in the hope that my opponent would run out of time – and I was losing my attention span entirely. One aggrieved, if melodramatic, Australian slid into my DMs to tell me: “Greed and worthless pursuits are your inheritance.” I remain a little concerned today that my family may now be cursed.īobby Fischer once said “blitz chess kills your ideas”, and that seemed to be what was happening to me. What’s more, it attracts more than a few angry messages. You can gain plenty of Elo points by running down the clock – sprinting around with a king and two pawns while your infuriated opponent chases you – but it doesn’t exactly improve your game. I was primarily playing blitz, a format where each player gets three minutes a match, and I began to win more often due to my opponents running out of time rather than by any tactical mastery. I couldn’t stop playing after a win, because one often leads to another, and I definitely couldn’t end on a defeat. But sometimes the milestone would never come – and so neither would the sleep. If my rating was anywhere near a round number, for example a ranking of 1,500 or 1,600, I would delay sleep until I got to the next hundred-mark milestone.
A club player has an Elo of about 1,600, while grandmasters are rated over 2,500. I devoured every episode of The Chess Pit podcast and became a disciple of Gotham Chess, a popular YouTube tutor.Ĭhess skill is measured on the Elo rating system. Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit brought millions more on to the servers, and I revelled in beating them with knight forks, discovered attacks and sacrifices. Learning by losing, I got to grips with the basics – develop your pieces, knights before bishops, control the centre.
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