Competitive Canadian Chessplayer

Hello all,

I am a Canadian chess player striving for continuous improvement. I've known how to play chess since I was very young, however I only started to take my improvement seriously since 2016. I am self-taught and started out my journey with playing tons of chess, mainly 10 minute games and analyzing (a few of) them afterwards. I did some puzzles, lessons, educational videos, etc. but was able to make great strides from playing and analyzing at least for the first few years.

I used to love games of 10 minutes and quicker (and still do), but over the years as I have been improving more and more, I have found the beauty of the game lies in longer time controls such as classical and correspondence where there is a lot of time to think through the intricacies of chess and not just rely on intuition and surface level calculation. As I have gotten better, I have also found studying chess more and more interesting (and more and more necessary for improvement!).

These days, I play some rapid chess and study here and there, and I limit my blitz and bullet. I also try to attend OTB events when time permits. I am currently phasing out my correspondence games and am not accepting new challenges/tournaments/team matches

In addition to standard chess, as a creative person, I have found custom position chess to be very intriguing and have been involved in creating and playing my own positions since 2017. I have posted a blog which is a list of my favourite custom positions that I have created over the years. Here is a link to that blog: https://www.chess.com/blog/RALRAL3333/my-best-custom-chess-positions. If you want to join a chess community all about custom chess positions, join the custom positions club! https://www.chess.com/club/custom-positions-club

My Custom Chess Position (theory + live chess) Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ralrialla/streams