Introductions and Welcomes

Hello everyone.  It is indeed a great pleasure to be a part of ChessNChill, outstanding Club!  Please feel free to introduce yourself.  Please feel free to welcome our new Members.  I'm a 63 year old fart.  lol  Been playing chess since 1969.  My wife and I were friends with Bobby Fischer.  The last movie that came out about him was mostly lies!  I was 1980 Eastern Kentucky Open Champion.  I use to be a decent player; though I can still play Master chess from time to time.  Age and having had a couple bad heat strokes have hampered my playing ability.  I'm married and have raised 2 sets of children to adulthood.  I was born in Cynthiana, Kentucky; and now live in Eastern Kentucky.  Who would have ever known that when I won that Tournament in '80, I would end up moving here and marrying my wife!  lol  Life it good!  Take care and God bless!  Once again, it is very nice to be here and a part of your all's lives!  BOOM!!!

I was born in Northern Ireland and I live in Colombia. I have double nationality (Colombian and British) and I've been playing chess for 6-7 months

Wow @imadarkhorse  Been playing chess for that short of period and are already where you are....Way to Go!!!

Howdy, i'm TatteredGreen, a retired scientist, who is playing chess as a 2nd career. i discovered chess in Decembre, 2017.  @RedThunderheart, i am a ginormous Bobby Fischer fan. When i read your biography, i was taken aback. That is so neat. It is an honour to know ye. Would ye be willing to visit with me about Mr. Fischer? Thanks and have a nice day, everyone.

@imadarkhorse, ye are a winner all the way around. Ye are a good sportsman and a very sharp chess player.

It is so good to see and hear about the great people that decided to join this club! @RedThunderheart thank you so much for such a great idea of a post and once again it’s an honor to have you hear!

Well, I was born and raised in East Harlem New York City, New York back during the bicentennial. I spent most of my young adult life there but I was not going anywhere and fast. So after my heart was broken Indecided to get out that place and move to Nashua New Hampshire were I made the decision to finish school.

After achieving that goal I pretty much saw myself becoming stagnant again until an opportunity to serve my country in the United States Marine Corps came up so I enlisted.

I was stationed in D.C. my entire tour because of the nature of my job. This is where I met my Beautiful wife. We got married shortly before my tour ended and we have been living in Northern Virginia ever since!

I’ve always loved Chess but was intimidated by it which, long story short lead me to streaming and playing chess. One of the main things that kept me away from learning how to play chess was what I saw as the perceived ‘culture’ of chess. It was “To proper of an activity” for me and people like me, ordinary folk. 

Running into the chess.com community and the chess community on twitch changed that for me, well at least started to. I began to realize that there wer a lot of novice players like myself that really wanted to learn the game but still felt a little intimidated about asking questions, putting themselves out there.

So that was it, a calm non judgmental and of course fun environment is what I am trying to cultivate here. I am so grateful for people like you guys who have decided to bless me with your part in this!

Peace and God Bless!!

Wow, Bro!  Thank-you so very much for sharing that!  I'm sure I'm not the only one here that would say this:  I greatly appreciate your Service to this Nation of ours!!!  I appreciate your kind words toward me.  I will never forget them!  You probably have no idea what they mean to me!  It is an Honor to be here with you and everybody else!  His Peace be with you also; and God bless you and yours!!!

 Last posting/replay was to our true Friend, @harlemknite !

I'm the resident Rhino! 

After childhood in europe, I'm formatively a Yankee, and have joked "I spent fifteen years of my life next to Interstate 93". That's the north-south eastern seaboard corridor. 

On the first week of high school, I broke my arm and had about four surgeries! So I became a chess player! I'm a little too fond of activity vs "safe sound moves" so my wins are full of complexity and my losses, well, this year I am hanging out in everyone's chess streams! 

I'm now in NY City, so it's fun to try to help Harlemknite get started both streaming and in the game. 

I work really hard to stay out of the chess controversies, because at some distant point I want to go for the USCF (United States) Expert title and there's no rating floor on c-com, and so you might as well take a long view of the game! 

Nice to meet cha, @MidnightRhino  Glad you're here in the good 'ole US of A! 

Welcome @MidnightRhino! Thanks for sharing and for all your help!

Hi guys, Kinglybingly here.

So  I grew up in poverty being part of a single parented family of 5 in Florida.  My dad's family was from New York, and I never really knew them.  Things were rough and I spent most of my time playing Chessmaster 5000 on the computer.  It was my escape.  I've always said Chess is my best friend and it's true! 

My step-dad was military which makes me a "military brat", and he taught me chess at the age of 6.  I have been on and off, 5 years playing, 5 years not playing, but I always come back to my best friend.  Moving around so much from base to base, I lost a lot of friends and made new ones, but one thing remained true, Chess was always there.  

In high school I was traveling through El Paso and ended up getting in a game against a kid younger than me.  After I won, he said, "You just beat the Texas kid's champion at chess."  I was so excited I started playing again and ended up playing on the college team.  

I spent most of my time in Advanced Calculus class on Chess.com in the back of the computer lab playing the 15/10s on Yahoo Games and Chess.com.

More "life" happened and I ended up moving to California where I met my first chess coach GM Aman Hambleton on the Chessbrah show and decided to take a few lessons.  After encouraging me to pursue streaming, I founded "vaperchess" because I was in to vaping, and streamed for a couple months.  

Getting serious about chess, I decided to get a USCF rating and found a club when I moved back to Minnesota called the Chess Castle.  On the member list, I saw Wesley So, John Bartholemew, and Andrew Tang.  I wanted to be a part of a chess community, and played a few tourneys, but that club life wasn't for me either. 

Finally, I ended up back on Chess.com and found out you can play USCF rated games 5 times a week through the club "USCHESS" on the live server.  I started streaming again under my original 2011 alias Kinglybingly, which stands for Knight Battery, and am so excited to be a part of the Twitch Streaming and Chess.com community.  I finally have found a place to meet new friends, share games, and tell stories like this 1! 

@KinglyBingly thank you so much for sharing!! It means a lot to me that you would do that here, I look forward to a continued friendship with you! 

@KinglyBingly  Thank-you so very much for telling us about yourself!  Thank-you for your Friendship here with us!!!

I'm from Belgium and I played my first game in 2012. I can't even remember any more how or why I decided to start playing chess, maybe it was after I saw someone play a chess engine on his laptop on the bus. I do remember I started with some very basic theory, like the Queen's gambit accepted trap, which I watched on Youtube. Of course almost no one played the lines from that video, so I remember I then switched to the King's Gambit accepted theory to expand my opening knowledge. Meanwhile I watched some Matojelic videos and other basic theory videos (how to develop the pieces, what to watch out for, forks, pins, pawn structure). I've always been an e4-e5 player as white and black, but I never really knew what I liked to play against 1. d4 as black, so I've played and still am playing a lot of different responses. As white I almost always end up in Italians after e5 (2. Bc4) because I've always like to have that bishop pointing at f7. This year I've started playing some Sicilians as a response to 1. e4 as black, but I still lack the knowledge to be truely dangerous, so I have to rely on my opponent to blunder to win.

My first reaction to chess, around 2005, was that it was an extremely boring game, because my nerdy friend enjoyed playing it. I just saw it as sitting on a chair for 4h while only moving a piece every 10 minutes, and I didn't like to sit still at all, so I decided I wasn't interested.

Then I went to university and I had to travel by bus a lot, and seeing this guy play on the bus, chess suddenly seemed like a distraction while traveling, and I downloaded the same program, and after getting bored by getting beaten by most of the engine difficulties, I decided to look online for human opponents and found Sparkchess.com

All this was pretty close to the exam period too, and I'm a terrible student, so I didn't study but instead started learning chess :-)

I remember being rated 650 when I started my first chess.com account, but I "quickly" improved until I reached 1100. From then on my rating improved for 100-150 and I was stuck for a very long time. I quit the game again for over a year, but still watched youtube videos and then I discovered twitch when I played other games, and also discovered some chess streams, which I decided to follow (Kingscrusher being the first one I knew). I created a lichess account because that was where Kingscrusher was playing and started playing again. I had forgotten my excact name and pass for the chess.com account by then though, so I had to create a new account and easily beat my previous 1300 rating, and went to around 1450. Now I'm usually at around 1500 and I dream of eventually reaching a rating of 1800 (hence my name, but when asked, I'll pretend it's referring to my tactics rating Kappa)

I was happy to see Harlem, a new, low-rated streamer play and discover the game, so I'm following the stream since yesterday. I'm curious to see what levels he can reach!

Nice to meet cha @Project1800  Thanks for your Post.  I enjoyed it!  

@Project1800 thank you so much for sharing! I’m so glad that you did because you have encouraged my to continue progressing! The running thing is that my favorite opening is the Queens Gambit lol thank you fir your support!!

I've started to play the Queen's Gambit a bit more again myself, but out of habit I often play e4 without thinking. Do you have a fixed opening against 1. e4/d4?

Also, since you have a diamond membership, you can do unlimited tactics. Doing these tactics also helped me get to where I am, I notice that I see forced sequences a lot more easily than I did a year ago, so even if I play horrible at the start of a game, I can sometimes pull off a mate outa nowhere.

And I'd say: let the engine analyse your games, so you can see where you made mistakes. If the mistakes where in the opening, you get some free opening theory. If they were further on in the game, you can maybe recognize the pattern in a later game (a bit the same as doing the tactics training).

Hi-

My name's Jason, I'm 47, live in northern Va and am boring as hell. I played a little chess when i was younger, but picked it back up about a year ago. Glad to meet you all and I look forward to playing. 

Hi @JellyBirdTheFish  Thanks for the Post!  Nice to have you here!!!

Hello @jellyBirdThefish! I apologize for not getting back to you sooner! I am also in Northern VA!!