What is your story? How did you start playing chess? What have you, and are you doing in chess?

I'm from Madrid, current capital of the empire. My older brother taught me a sort of semi-legal chess when we were kids, but we didn't play very often. But at age 15 I became a good friend of a classmate who was a very good player and I got interested and improved. I was regularly beating the crap out of my brother and my father, both awful losers. But the next year my mate moved to another city and I lost interest. 

Playing only ocassionally until my late 30's, I started to take it seriously again then, as an outlet. Guessing my old friend could be a member of a club, I found him (we had lost all contact) and joined too. He's a +2250 FIDE nowadays. I got hooked again, and try to play and study as often as possible. I'm playing the Madrilenian Teams League since 2013 (you can meet Julio Granda in the top division), although I only have time to play about 5 games per year.

I can't exactly remember why i got into chess but i know why i love it so much compared to other sports/games. In other sports they are usually team-based and there will always be a 'Worst player' in that team and as a result the team can only perform as well as the worst player is performing otherwise you're pretty much excluding him from the team. In chess it's one vs one and no-one is holding you back.

For me it was also no luck. No dice, no spinning number wheel. Thanks for sharing.

It will be interesting to see. So far it is going well.

I learned playing chess in 1975 my best school friend taught me, we were all both 7 years old.

He was allready a club player ,but my chess experience came only from him .

So of course he beat me in every single match when you're seven you can't be a good chess coach .

I remember i didnt liked to play white because you had the initiative

For example he let me premove the fried liver attack only to show me the traxler counterattack (so i loosed again !)

i stopped playing chess until 2001 when good computers where at home (but playing against computers is so boring!)

Since 2013 i'm playing on chess.com and i'm so happy with that!

I’m 14, started playing chess when I was 5 (learnt the rules from dad), stagnated until i was about 12 yrs old then played some chess at school, within a year I became the strongest player in my town, I realised there must be people much better than me I can play and learn of somewhere. So then at 13 I came onto chess.com. Over the next year I played in a few regional tournament and did decently with scores around 4/6. These were tournament with players most around 1800 level and about 400 less and more. One tournament even had a Welsh IM who had moved to Australia. One month ago I learnt that my cousin ( he’s 15 yrs old) is an IM in India ( I’m Indian) and he has 2 GM Norms, his dad directed me to a coach who I learnt with for a month and now I’ve come back to Australia, started reading books and going from here.

I still like to do physical activities, but chess is a nice pastime whenever I have some time.

Especially when there’s no physical sports available to play.

Hello to the chess community ! 

This is AKJett, 18, from Athens,Greece ! 

I first learnt the rules from my grandmother when I was I believe six or seven, but never went int a club until the age of 10. I rapidly progressed when I joined the club and by the age of 17 I was really playing 2000 level chess (albeit with an underrated rating) 

However exams got in the way and I quit chess for about a year and a half. Thankfully, I achieved my goal of going to university in this summer's exams (I study computer engineering now) and now I finally have some time to get back into OTB chess . 
I beleive after some online training and game I have reached my past level of 1900+ strength again (my FIDE rating at this time is about 1850)

My goal is some time to become a titled player like FM (reaching 2300 FIDE rating).

You can all help your chess/help me improve that chess by viewing my channel and commenting !

Fun facts : I have just read about 5 chess books but all of them were great ones (and none of them was about openings)
I am currently playing in the finals of my university's chess championship
Also I should mention that my club went from the fifth division of the country to the first in 5 years, due to rapidly improved junior players (in case you wondered how i got "good").

In my channel's forum thread I will leave a link to this thread so that people can see my story and other people's stories.

Cheers to all and may you have a happy 2018 ! 

Jett

I am from New Mexico, currently living in California

I learned to play chess from my dad, but I got interested because I my sisters were "too good" to play me, and my dad always crushed me. When I finally beat my dad, I entered tournament play (He was rated about 1200, so a young'n like me had to be good to beat him)

In the past I have done the following chess related activities ... state titles, etc.

Currently I am doing the following chess activities ... online?

Well...I had the opportunity to hear a motivational speaker by the name of Salome Thomas-El, a Philadelphia inner city school principal. During the speech he gave his experience on how he took some not so very bright students and taught them chess. From my recollection, they won tournaments locally and nationally. I think a movie was based on his experience. I also heard a man by the name of Chaplain Barry Black who currently serves as chaplain to the US Senate talk about his chess experiences while serving as a navy Admiral at sea. After doing much research, I started learning and memorizing openings only to discover that the strategies for winning is not limited to the opening, but there was the middle-game, and furthermore the endgame, not to mention tactics. It wasn’t as easy as I initially thought. Although I have absolutely no desire to engage in competitive chess, I find it to be very therapeutic. Whenever I have downtime I watch YouTube videos on morphy’s, Alekhines, and some of the greats...past and present. Although we can study chess, much of the ability is naturally determined—-Magnus and Nakamura.

May I recommend that you not only leave your story but read the other stories here. I have found them very interesting. We all have this in common. Sometime in our past we were introduced to chess and found it an attractive game for various reasons. Mostly that it holds some value to our mental health and happiness. A reminder that this game was invented by humans for humans and is a part of the shared human experience. Computers will never take that away. 

I grew up in the Netherlands and it was there that my mom and I started playing each other. Neither of us k new any tactics so it was really pathetic! But, it was really fun, too! I never tried to get any good at it except for a very short while back in the nineties. Bought some books and just couldn't get it. I always wanted to be good at this--really good. That's what I'm after now. Being able to play the computer online is priceless to me. I can play and learn how to do things. I bought another batch of books , too.

I'll be glad when I'm good enough to start a club here in Chillicothe. I wish someone would write a small book on how to start a tournament. I'm sort of the organizer type person and I would really love to do this.

Anyway, I'm Tim Houlihan and I live in Chillicothe, Ohio. I'm really happy to be a part of this club.

I hope more people will see this subject and leave their story. I've really enjoyed hearing all the stories so far.

@JamesColeman you might be surprised. Scholastic chess is huge here in the USA. There have been news stories showing programs that have had huge positive effects on schools outcomes. Even today your mother may have seen a benefit to "forcing" you to play. She sound pretty wise to me.

Not much, but I joined the school chess club in 7th grade. After a while, I decided that it might be a good idea to look up chess sites, and this site was the 1st one to show in almost every single list of "Best Chess sites", so I joined, and got my membership a little less than 2 months later. We played tournaments against another local middle school, and we always lost terribly. I was one of the best players in the club, and when we moved to a different school without a chess club, it was almost like half of them learned chess a month ago. Place an unprotected queen next to another unprotected queen, and they would not take your queen!

I play chess on this site, and every once in a while at school, although I am thinking of joining a local chess club and start playing rated games sometime

My older brother taught me when I was seven. I didn't beat him until I was 22. I first got really interested during the Fisher/ Spassky match- I was about 20 years old. My first tournament was speed chess (5 minutes) at the Paramus mall in NJ. It was very exciting - I saw Walter Browne!. My first regular tournament was in NYC - I took the bus. Lost all 3 games.I haven't played over the board in awhile, but I enjoy playing on chess.com. Thanks for all the interesting stories that were posted.

@nostaticatall our stories are similar. It is so interesting to read all these stories.

 I learned to play as a kid but was never serious about it, even though I always enjoyed it. The game always intrigued me but I never took initiative to really learn the game beyond how the pieces move. 

 

 Then one day shortly after I joined the Army, I started playing with someone who was in a chess club. He would destroy me every time, and I begged him to teach me the basics and help me get better and he refused. So I went to the library and picked up a Chess book and started playing more. Then I ended up joining Chess websites, someone recommended Chessmaster and that did a lot to help me improve.  From that point forward it’s been mostly playing online.  In fact, almost entirely playing online because I don’t know anyone else who plays seriously. 

 

 Except when I go on deployments, usually I can find a couple of people and play regular over the board games.