Phases in learning chess, Phase Ten
Starting this blog was a 'side-mission' for me, one I will continue, but I also manage a club which is rising to the point we were before and we aim to rise even further. When I say 'I manage' I am inaccurate, we are a team of admins who serve the club we created, that is how we see it. In the mean time I have published two Newspapers for the club and the third is almost ready too. So busy, busy bee. Now onwards ...
After joining chess.com in 2008 and playing a few live games. I joined chessimo.com 2 years later to play correspondence chess, it was more active at the time with about 1.5 million users. And the game sharing was fully integrated with Facebook, in a time Facebook actually showed you the things your friends shared and no advertisements. The username also was simply your name at FB. I played about 5000 daily games there. Evolving from around 1250 ELO to an average of about 1400-1500. I peaked well over 1800, but that was a result of both many opponents timing out and the funny side effect of a high rating: People tend to give up sooner, sometimes even when I didn't see a clear advantage for my own position. The site was very badly maintained though and the activity got less and less, at one point maybe 10,000 active players and when it was inaccessible for weeks for the third time, I decided to leave it all together and migrate all activity to chess.com.
The site consisted of round robin tournaments alone basically, for two to ten players. After playing many cheaters, blatant ones, I decided to play only versus people who had defeated me as well as I had defeated them. A good way to see whether one is trustworthy in my eyes. We started to be a real tight group of players. Especially after I got the idea to get them all in a single tournament. 32 of us, yeah that doesn't fit in 10 player tournaments. So I created four separate tournaments for 8 players each and the best 2 of each got invites to tournaments that were called UWC Round 2 ... and so on. It worked great. We played 3 of those over the years and it was good fun. With a simple excel sheet it wasn't difficult to maintain and the results were shared easily too.
By the time I decided to leave that broken site, we knew each other for years and I asked all of them to join me in the move to this site, which by then was way better! About 20 came along with me and about a dozen are still active here and with me in my private club, you know who you are mates. Great to have met you and still play this great game together!
. Found in my archive: preliminary standings UWC3 2016
I have met some of the best people via chess sites, this one and the old one alike. People with surprisingly similar interests in other areas as well. People from all over the world. Must be one of the best sides of the world wide web, it is like real life anyway simply ignore the bad ones, that is the best way to handle it in the 'real' world as in the virtual world.
This is the time I also started to follow chess lessons and try to become better at this wonderful game. That was indeed Phase Ten, getting into the social aspect of chess itself and learning from friends. Not surprisingly people tend to learn how it is you play and it doesn't get easier because of it, on the other hand you learn their weaknesses as well if you play more than just a few games. So, strong players, if you wonder why I keep challenging you: some day I'll get you mate!
Next time: some actual games with comments. Phases become more blurry though...
