Just a quick update on my chess life... the rest of my chess life has gotten so busy over the last 5 months that I have stopped working with a coach. I've actually had to give up a lot of things to make sure I a doing right by work, family and m...
It's been a while since I posted. Family, work and other good stuff has pulled more of my time and energy than it did earlier in the winter. As an adult improver, it is interesting to see what changes when my plan needs some modification.One of ...
Committing time to improving at chess is not easy. All of us have other demands on our time, and for the amateur chess player, chess is often not the most important thing. But, while we love it, we make the time. I love the images of Magnus Car...
These last few weeks have contained some interesting changes for this adult improver. First and foremost... I'm playing less?Yup. This is an extension of what I had written about in an earlier post. I have gotten off of blitz and bullet and am ...
People are stubborn. By people, I mean the human mind. Specifically, mine. Yes, I resolved to improve my game. I knew this meant studying more. I started working with Chessable and I started working with a coach. I had already been working o...
Over the Christmas break I have been laying out how I want to spend my time in terms of chess training. As an armature player with a family, ad day job and other things going on, I only have so much time. I am working with a coach, playing and s...
Part of the notion that I want to get "serious" about chess feels weird. I can only do so much. My mind is what is and I am not a young kid. I have a job, a family and other interests, but I want to know more. So here I am, so busy that I regu...
While the winter months are especially hard on me, I have to say that these are becoming exceptionally good chess days. The club I run at my school is really taking off and getting good support from administration and Parent Council. I have star...
When I set off to play in my first live tournament, I tried to stay focused on why I was there. I wanted to see how a Swiss tournament was run so I could run one for the students at the school where I teach. I knew I wasn't really prepared for t...
Tale of a 4 foot killer. I knew coming into this tournament that I was going play a lot of kids AND lose to them. In the end, I played 5 matches and the combined age of my opponents was the same as my age. In game 3, I played a 6 year old boy. ...
Round 2: I'll keep this one short. It was a disaster. Some of my initial nerves about playing in a tournament were gone, but I made some fundamental errors in the opening and never recovered. I slowed down in my study, stretching this out to 5...
This past weekend, I competed in my first OTB chess tournament at the Mississauga Fall Open. It was put on by elevatemychess.com and was CFC rated (FIDE and CFC rated for the Open division). Ken Green acted as tournament director and did a wonde...
This all escalated quickly.I have been running the chess club at our school since just before the Pandemic. Chess.com made it possible for us to continue when we couldn't meet in person. This year I really want to offer an OTB tournament experie...
While I really like the expression, "You can do anything you put your mind to".... no. Not entirely. There are real barriers, some we have as a matter of priority and choice while others are unavoidable. Sometimes what is needed in order to ach...
As an adult beginner, I don't have any illusions about my capacity for chess. I didn't build skill sets young and I don't have innate ability. I really like studying theory and lessons, but what I really learn from is getting beat up by my own m...
One of the pieces of advice that I encountered early on was from Gotham Chess. He said that if you want to improve, don't spend a lot of time in Bullet or Blitz. I have tried to heed that advice. The idea is that if you are playing quickly, lon...
I have absolutely no idea where or when I learned to play chess. Sometime during grade school, I'm sure, I picked up on how to move the pieces. That being said, I never really studied it or played the game seriously or regularly. Grade school w...
Over 50 n00b? What could possibly go wrong? 
