CHAPTER ONE: THE AWAKENING
"It is ALIVE!!!" - Gene Wilder as Baron von Frankenstein in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein
Like some of us, my Chess Monster recently awoke from decades of hibernation. Recent retirement, the pandemic, and Queen's Gambit all combined to thaw the monster and breath life into it. This blog is primarily my story of how he came to dominate my 60+ year old brain and reach into its sleepy corners, pick it up and violently shake it, and slap me silly. I'll keep these each to a max of 1000 words...
Digging through old boxes I found my ancient scoresheet pad, some crummy unweighted wooden pieces my parents bought me 50 years ago, and my old books with descriptive notation. The most unwieldly and cumbersome was Horowitz' Chess Openings: Theory and Practice. The Oxford Companion to Chess also survived...you can't throw out anything from the Oxford Press now can you (there's a gargantuan OED in our house too, with its magnifying glass)?! and of course a 40 year old Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. Aha! There's my 2.25" Drueke board I splurged on in 1982! My vintage Fidelity Excellence computer and Scisys mini-computer surfaced, and they still worked. Some plastic tournament pieces and my trusty green/white vinyl board completed my inventory. Now what?
My two remaining memories from Chess in the Era of Youth were; 1) playing speed chess in the HS cafeteria with the other nerdlings. Rodney Thurman dominated while slamming pieces on the plastic clock...where is he now?, and 2) getting my ass kicked at the Fairfield County CT Chess Club. At some point girls, cars, and college prep took over.
Fast Forward to 2020: Having just recently retired and being an empty nester, chess ramrodded itself into my fascinating (to me) lazy susan of other hobbies/projects. With the onset of colder weather, the old MGB, sailboat racing, and photography faded into the background while the Chess Monster shouldered its way into prominence. I began to purchase pieces and boards I was sure were needed 
, matched them for aesthetic and playability. It helped to have money. My old plastic clock was long gone so I upgraded to digital. This process acquired tremendous momentum after joining chess.com and taking Garry Kasparov's Master Class. Soon my moleskin note book was full of scribbles, highlights, and underlines.
Solution: Start a powerpoint deck!! At the outset I figured this would be 10-15 slides, but this scholarly tome bloomed to 142 slides after 6 months of effort. You Tube, wikipedia, and various apps were voraciously consumed to spit out various bullet points, animations, and summaries in my Ozymandias-style powerpoint epic. The 1st "cliff notes" style slides contained condensed gems from Kasparov and Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, and rapidly approached escape velocity as the habit fed on itself. Elemental forces were now at work and as we all know, "you canna change the laws of physics!"
Then, a foundational, Self Realization, (Deux est Machina if you're into the classics and prefer self-aggrandizing use of Latin phrases): WAY too much focus on openings. The ppt now had little animations of pieces that I built in, and I had more opening theory than I would ever need. I went ten moves deep on many, and had a fairly useless compendium of opening theory, albeit customized for my own consumption. My tactics knowledge was still frozen in ice in 1978. I needed a blowtorch.
Course correction and The Intervention (wherein I pry myself away from silly, way too deep, opening study):
- Dan Heisman - Guide to Chess Improvement
- Jeremy Silman - Complete Book of Chess Strategy and Understanding the Middlegame
- John Nunn - Chess Tactics for Students
Now I was learning about learning...a much higher level of approaching chess. Slowing down, how to evaluate candidate moves, then 1000s of chess.com puzzles for tactical pattern recognition. Discovering the boundless puzzles, lessons, analysis tools, gamified badges! All while watching my rating decline...
Was something amiss that my towering intellect and workmanlike elbow grease had missed ?
Next Time: The struggle of online ratings and the value of expanding my chess universe from blasting thru chess.com games to absorbing knowledge. Spoiler alert: which computer? How do I spend more money than I need to?
