Hey!

I have never played chess in a club or had a chess coach or anything like that, so I have a rather limited knowledge of chess theory. I have read 100 pages of Irving Chernev's Logical Chess, but that's about it, I'm not booked up. However, I have watched many good instructional chess videos by Seirawan, Rosen, Svidler, Ramirez, Schrantz, Kelley, Bartholomew, Akobian, Finegold, Rozman, Williams, Stjepan (Hanging Pawns), Denby, Naroditsky etc. and also learned from the commentary of e.g. Jon Ludvig Hammer.

I find Scid vs PC (combined with Stockfish, and a database like Caissabase) to be a useful tool for analyzing games and preparing openings. The opening explorer on Chess.com is also good. I am not using ChessBase though. Solving tactics puzzles and Puzzle Rush on Chess.com is definitely good for improving my chess. I hate tactics training though, but understand that it's a necessary evil to improve at chess. Tactics are such a terrible part of chess. I do not consider chess to be anywhere near 99 % tactics, thankfully. Studying opening-theory is also kind of boring imho, and I can only imagine the amount of work/hours needed to reach a very high level in chess.

I'm not a big fan of playing Blitz or Bullet, but 15|10 is okay. I don't quite understand why Blitz and Bullet are so popular to play. I suspect part of the reason I'm a bit slow is due to a lack of experience, but I suppose I'm also a bit "slow" in general. I'm sure Blitz chess would appeal more to me if I knew more chess theory.

I would prefer it if draw offers in chess were illegal. The main reason is my experience with too many incoming draw offers when having a better position.

I used to be an NES (Nintendo) 8-bit speedrunner, had a couple of NES world records at times back in 2007-2012, even streamed a bit on Twitch back then. Maybe I will stream some chess games in the future, if I reach a decent level.

While some video games like e.g. Skyrim and Elden Ring are clearly fine art imho (and beautiful, e.g. fantastic landscapes and Jeremy Soule's music), I'm not entirely convinced that chess should be labelled as art. To me it's mostly about winning, but it's also good gameplay I guess. Maybe I just have this viewpoint because I'm not the best tactician, and consider my best chances of winning are when lulling my opponent into a "boring" position, who knows?

I'm a big fan of football (soccer), but I don't care all that much about e.g. athletics and poker. I also love music, play the guitar and piano, and have produced a bit in Cubase with a MIDI-keyboard, and recording guitar, drums, bass etc.

Arctic7