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

Neat thread.

Thanks @CHESSMASTERorCM.

I hope more people will see this thread and share their story. Be sure to share it with your friends.

Im just trolling around in chess.com

I remember many years ago I was playing in the Yorkshire league in a town called Harrogate or maybe it was Huddersfield.

I was playing top board (it was in the third division) and my opponent would be a very young but fancied player with a much lower rating, (which meant little at the time as gradings were at least a year out of date and young people can come on very quickly).

Things did not go well from the start, as my opponent who was fairly short of stature even for a 10-year-old, would sit on the back of the chair in order to see the board properly which I found a little off-putting. Also, he spent most of his time eating snack bars with crackly wrappers. His normal mode was to go play on a games console (The venue was a working men's club with the newly popular video game consoles in the bar), stroll back to the board sit up on the back of the chair, feet on the seat,  candy bar in hand. chew reflectively for a minute, move and leave. I was struggling as the position became quite blocked but I devised a rather startling double sac of knight and rook in front of his castled king exposing him to attack from my queen and a bishop. I was relying on the tendency of young players top hang on to extra material come what may. I sacrificed the knight which he took with a shrug. Then before he could leave I sacced the rook. He fell off the chair and after he picked himself up unharmed he did at least sit correctly. The rest of the game was spent with me chasing his king round the board and he at least stayed put at the table candy-bar forgotten at his side. I eventually won.  

LOL  A great story @chessspy1. 

^ +1 

I learned to play from a book by Horowitz in 1995, when I was 21. I played my first human in 1996 when I got online.  I've never played in a live tournament and have only played a handful of games OTB. For various reasons, I only play blitz and bullet now.   I am a chess writer more so than a chess player. 

Thanks for sharing your story @batgirl.

I'm wondering if we can get more stories? By posting I hope it will bring this topic back to the top of the list. From there maybe it will get someones attention again. Share your story with us. There are some great ones here to read.

When I was seven my two years older brother was in hospital, after a motrobike accident.

He didn't have many things to occupy himself with, in the hospital, so my father started playing chess with him. My brother taught me the rules, when he came back home. We played often, now we play rather rarely, but it is usually me who wins, even though I'm the biggest blunderer of this universe

I was 9 when my father taught me after he returned from overseas duty.  I would copy his moves until he started attacking, but it gave me a good development structure.  It was not until I was 11 and in the hospital after being hit by a car before I played someone else.  It was a military hospital and I would play some of the service men also in the hospital.  I would win most of the time.  This surprised them, and we would usually have a group of them ready to play.  From then on my game progressed.  My father and I would play regularly until he passed away.  I think back to those days with fondness.  I blunder (piece,  1 or 2 move mates, etc) more often than I care too admit, but I still have fun.

My younger brother taught me the moves when I was 18. He won the first game and the second was stalemate. I'm not sure we played a third game but we certainly didn't play after that evening. . Seemed he lost his appetite.

A friend and I played a fair bit over the next summer holidays. I know now we were just pushing wood.

My wife bough me a computerised chess board about 30 years ago and I had a lot of fum with it.

I didn't realise there was more to chess until I joined Chess.Com. now I'm quite addicted, mainly to blunders.

Very nice stories, thanks for this thread.

I learned the rules from my father when I was 5 years old. I don't know when I started actually playing then, maybe at 7? I first only played family members whenever I could, most of the time my parents. I was taught out of a book by Siegbert Tarrasch, which is a bit outdated as far as the specific openings go, but which I can still recommend. He starts with basic endgames and then spends many pages on all the possible tactical patterns in the middle game with countless examples. Really taught me to focus on tactics before everything else.

One day my father bought a chess software called PSION and it destroyed me at the lowest level. I played game after game with the goal of lasting longer. I remember how proud I was when I once made 80 moves. At one point the unthinkable happened and I even won!

For many years, my strongest opponent was my granddad. He had learned the game as a POW in Britain in the aftermath of WW2. Apparently they even held tournaments there. And while I neither like the reason for him being there (Germany trying to conquer the world and murdering people), nor the company he kept (nazis), I guess I have to be grateful these tournaments took place. This was an inspiring challenge and it was also nice, because he taught me to get better and it was fun to spend time together in this way. I liked the calm atmosphere of these clockless games. His main (but not his only) advice was to always move the rook pawns one step forward. A few years down the line we had a little further discussion on this topic   In time, I came to beat him, but that was only once I had been part of a club for a while and got some instruction and long after I could beat almost any other casual non-club player in my surroundings.

I played at school against friends and created a little after school chess club. That didn't last very long, but it was fun while it lasted and we even went to a one day rapid tournament, where we would compete individually against other school teams. When I was 13 years old I played in my first long tournament and shortly thereafter joined my first chess club. This was in the 90s and in a quarter of my city where many russian emigrants lived and the level of play was quite high even among the youths, many of who were around 14 years of age (to add some perspective: by 'high' I mean 1600 at most, which was hundreds of points above my level). I went to a few training sessions, one of which was with IM Sielecki and a group of youths. There I learned to be more humble about my abilities, because I saw that there was a huge universe of things I didn't know about chess and that even in my favorite area of tactics there were many people who were much better than me and that I probably would never be able to catch up with regardless of effort. I was in awe of chess, but also realized that I would never be able to play it professionally, which was a kind of strange relief. I also went to take different lessons on the endgame, but the whole triangulation business somehow was way over my 15-year old head.

Then it somehow stopped being fun for me, because I didn't enjoy playing in team competitions just because it was a certain date and instead of wanting to play as a reason and I also didn't enjoy the pressure to compete that I felt was put on me. I also had other interests. So I stopped when I was 16, but didn't lose my love for the game and am still grateful for the experiences I had at my old club, for what I was taught by my teacher and others and for the friends I made there.

At that time, relatives gave me the book "Chess" by Laszlo Polgar as a present and I solved the one move mate puzzles on the same day. The two move mates took me ten years, but finally I made it. I think the three move mates will have to wait for the next lifetime!

A few years later I discovered an online server and played a few thousand games within the span of a year (blitz but also rapid and standard). I enjoyed it and I also enjoyed the strong opposition. I joined a different chess club and have been playing for it for more than ten years. The funny thing is that upon starting over I performed instantly hundreds of rating points above my rating when I had stopped. I guess online play helps and also calmer nerves. Regularly I play against my old team and even against my old chess coach (who I have surpassed rating wise by now), which brings up mixed memories, but is nice on the other hand. It wasn't so nice though when I couldn't hold a draw in a decisive game against him and our team didn't move up one division because of this loss

Now I'm playing whenever I feel like it, I enjoy being part of a team and a club as well as competing in tournaments and I also play online and against friends IRL. Looking forward to a few more decades of that.

I started playing chess watching my dad's friends play in a bar. I learned by myself seeing them play and bought a book, the book about games commented by Smyslov. I fell in love with chess and started playing there. I was 5 or 6 years old and started losing, I decided to study diagrams from the father's book of the Judit  Polgar and I learned from it. So I grew up, I started dating and I stopped playing for years, I started playing again now.

 Some of the stories put a tear in my eye. Others put a smile on my face. Still others do both. My story connects me with yours. What a great game. 

Yeah!

I am from New York and had a long relationship with chess sets before I knew what the game was about. I loved playing war games with the pieces in the backyard and would set the pieces on fire.

By age 9 I had burned around 15 sets but the neighbours complained about my fires and the smoke plastic pieces can create. Around this time my folks got worried about my behaviour and I had to see a psychologist for 6 months and he suggested I learned to play the game instead.

I refused to learn openings believing it to be a form of cheating. Despite this I did pretty well at school level.

After school I played in an OTB tournament but got banned for 5 years after punching my opponent in the face. An assault charge was laid against me too, mainly because I had a rook in my hand when I punched the guy which cut open his cheek and nose.

By now I was old enough to buy and burn my own chess sets. Over the years I have burned around 100 chess sets.

After another fight in a park against a chess player I ended up in court and was forced to see more psychologists and got a suspended sentence.

A friend of mine suggetsed chess.com where I couldn’t burn the sets or punch my opponents.

Since joining I have actually made a bit of a name for myself as an alround nice guy who often tries to keep the peace in the many fights here on the forums.

I'll guess the rook is the piece you keep.

     I'm from California and my friend taught me how to play when I was 8. We were at my grandma's house looking through her board games and my friend pulled out chess. I didn't want to play because I thought chess was too hard but my friend convinced me to give it a try. He didn't know all the rules but we had a lot of fun playing anyway. When my friend came back to my house to spend the night we made a chess set out of Legos so we could keep playing.

 When I got an actual chess set I played against my family and friends but I didn't put effort into improving until I found out about the annual chess tournament in high-school. It was a very casual tournament hosted by the 9th/10th grade science teacher. We didn't have clocks or official pairings. You basically just played whoever showed up that day. In 9th and 10th grade I got 4th place. When I was 16 I signed up on redhotpawn.com and I improved rapidly after that. I came back to my high school's tournament in 11th and 12th grade and easily won every game. My former science teacher was very impressed at my improvement and the fact that I could now easily beat him (he always beat me the first 2 years).

  I'm now 27 and I've improved over the years by watching youtube videos and playing a lot of correspondence chess just like I started doing on redhotpawn.com. Sometimes I go back there and look through my old games for fun. I would like to eventually join a chess club and play in USCF tournaments.