My Chess History

How I started to play chess

 I can't forget that day...

Dedinove, a small village near Kolomna, 100 km south west of Moscow, it was the winter of 1979, I was 4.5 years old or so.

My grandmother, Zoya Vasilevna, god grace be upon her, took out a chess tuition book, and started to give me and my grandfather, Nikandor Foderevitch, God grace be upon him, instructions:

- Shake hands she said. and we did

- Now sit down

we drew our chair near the big table in the kitchen and sat down

- Now, she continued, the pawn

and she red out loud how to move the pawn, and how to take pieces by pawn

piece by piece, and step by step, which I can't recall  now, I learnt chess.

My favourite competitor was my grand father, and my grand mother, later on, when I moved to my parents, I started to play with my mother and father.

my father fell for me when I was 5, my mother was next on the list few years later, along with my grandparents.

It took me more time to take out my cousin, God he was tough, he was 9 moth older than I am, the last time we played was 1989 or so.

We moved in Syria in 1980, I went to school that year. chess was not a popular game like in Russia, so I had to wait till 1985 to find local opponent, but I never found a match till 1988.

My parents bough me a computer, it was Z80 processor based, so called ZX Spectrum, with 48kb of memory (imagine), and I was exposed to the artificial intelligence of chess, but after many games, I have found out that the programme was stupid, and always will fall under long games, specially after taking out his queen. so far, I had no Idea about chess openings, the only opening I knew was 1- e4, e5, 2- kf3, or 1- e4, e5, 2-d4 or so.

The big change had to wait till 1991, this is  where I solved my first check mate in 4 I found in some chess magazine, It took me two month, next I started to read some literature, and learnt about openings.

I continued to play chess occasionally, but never seriously.  I guess my mind will not respond the way I want, as I hate memorizing positions, or learning openings, so any (dummy) with some openings knowledge may shatter my position after few moves, and it will take me double effort to re-gain my balance in the mid-game.

to be continued