First Date
Click! Click! These are the familiar sounds that can be heard on any wooden chess board set. My first real introduction to chess begins as a young child having just been given a Chinese chess set from some shop in China by my grandfather. My parents always had to work so my grandfather would take care of me and my brother during that time. My grandfather would travel back and forth from China to America to do so. Each time, there would always be some goodies that were brought back from China and this time it was a chess set.
Naturally, I was very intrigued by chess because this was my first exposure. After some time, I eventually learned about how all the pieces moved and how the game worked. Once that happened, I binge played the game for quite some time. During that time, I also learned a variation of traditional Chinese chess called Chinese dark chess. Chinese dark chess differs in that the game uses only half the board and the pieces are flipped. After learning of this variation, I began to enjoy the game even more. I would play and continue to play until I grew out of it (which didn’t take very long as a kid). In my household, there just wasn’t enough sustained interest from other people to keep me going. This was a time when playing chess online wasn’t really a thing either. At least not to my small young-child mind. So my interest sort of faded here.
Second Date
Cut to a few years later when I receive a board game set as a Christmas gift that includes chess– international chess or Western chess. The box included an instruction set on how to play chess which I eagerly read. I played chess with no understanding other than how the pieces moved. At this point in time, I was still ignorant to the basics of chess. With no proper guidance, I am sure that I slowly lost interest in chess.
Third Date
It is now the present day. Something reignited my interest in chess and I am now solving chess puzzles online occasionally. My method of solving chess puzzles at this point was based on trying all possibilities of moves in my head before finding one that was reasonable enough to try as an answer. Frequently, I found out that I was wrong. My puzzle elo hovered around 1500 for quite some time. Around the time of 2020, chess started to become a big thing on this streaming platform called twitch.tv. It was there that I started to watch a chess grandmaster broadcast his online chess games. After watching someone else play for a few months, I decided to try to learn how to play.
I learned basic tactics such as forks, pins, and skewers and learned ideas about how to “develop” my pieces. As I learned more, I realized how deep chess really was. I began to see beauty in the game. Here is where I began to truly enjoy solving chess puzzles and playing games. For the record, I am terrible at the game though. I would consider myself to be a very casual player, but I have come to enjoy it quite a bit.
