500 Elo - The Quest Begins

Like most people I know, I learned how to play chess as a kid and forgot about it in middle school. What brought me back was, curiously enough, not Beth Harmon but the Pogchamps event. Watching streamers blunder left and right made me wonder how I'd fare and started my chess.com account to see for myself. 

At the initial questionnaire to open an account, I had the audacity to pick 'intermediate' as my level. So I was placed at a 1000 elo rating with a question mark, if I recall correctly, and lost every game I ever played with the occasional victory due to a player abandoning the game. I landed nicely and stabilized around 500 and thus, began my ascent.

A small excerpt from the book that I feel, hilariously, illustrates my point: 

"6 ... d6! 7 d4 Bb6! (guarding against Qa4 and d4-d5 ideas). Now the continuation 8 dxe5 dxe5 9 Qxd8+ Nxd8 10 Nxe5 regains the pawn, but following 10 ... Be6 White's initiative has all but expired."

Let me know if you can keep up without looking at a board.

Learning chess is both exciting and soul-crushing since new ideas just make so much sense that I can't wait to try them out just to realize in a real game that I haven't acquired any secret knowledge and all my opponents have the same, if not higher, understanding of the principles as I do.

I recently reached 600 so progress is happening after all, but for sure the best tool has been real-world experience. Your brain will remember not to fall for scholar's mate after losing 5 games to it, no matter how many times you read it in a book.

Chess content on youtube and twitch has kept my interest alive and rated puzzles keep me engaged with the game when I don't feel like losing too much on the same day but all in all, every day feels like I want to play more and more games to try and aim at the 1000 elo I claimed to have when I started on 2019.