Daily Chess Puzzle Fun

Hi everyone, my name is Dennis and this is my very first blog post! First I want to tell you that, if you want to know more about me, I won't talk about that here - just go to my profile page and click "About Me"!  

In this first blog post of mine, I will talk about the Daily Chess puzzles. I try to solve them every day, although, like most of you know, they're quite different from time to time. A lot of them involve mating the opponent's King in one or more moves, but a lot are also about different aspects, like tactics for example. Take a look at today's puzzle, that should be a good example of a tactics puzzle:

I found this a very interesting puzzle. I almost always do, actually. Most puzzles do take me a few tries though, as I am still a beginning chess-player. I'm glad that the Daily Chess puzzles do not affect my rating, because I've seen it go down more than it went up since I joined Chess.com!  

I used to a chess-club member a few years ago. I do remember that I had already learned the basics of chess before I joined that club, but I do not remember when or who taught me about chess. Anyway, to get back on track, when I was a member of that chess-club, we used to get homework after our lessons - every one of us had a small paperback study guide which were divided into "steps", each step getting more difficult (for example, step 1 would be the basics and the first things you learn about chess such as the board, the layout of the pieces, the basics of the game, how to checkmate, etc. while step 2 would already go a bit further with tactics and techniques and such). In those study guides were also chess puzzles, but we called them chess diagrams back then. Those study guides contained explanations about various concepts of chess, and then on the next page, there would be chess puzzles about the concept we just learned about - we had to fill them in with arrows to show how the pieces had to move, and later we also had to write down the moves in Algebraic Notation. It was fun, it really was, but back then I was still in school and school gives homework as well. After some time, the homework piled up from both school and the chess-club, and soon after that I resigned from the club because the homework had practically turned into a homework mountain (in a figure of speech, of course ). I do admit that it was a bit lame of me to just resign like that, because it wasn't because I didn't like chess anymore - if that had been the case, I wouldn't be here writing this! But I still look back to that chess-club as a fun memory. I thought it would be nice to tell you all about this because of the chess puzzles.

Well, that was all for my first blog post. I hope my story wasn't too boring... but hey, if it was, you could just stop reading, right?!  Well, I wish you all the best, and see you on Chess.com!