I first started playing chess as a child, when I accidentally walked into a chess club through the wrong door and ended up staying there for the whole summer. After that I had no one to play with, until in 2014, on my way to Paris, I played a game with a guy I knew, and it got him so worked up that he invited me on my next trip just to get his revenge. Thus I decided to return to chess, but my enthusiasm faded within a few months as I kept losing to experienced opponents who knew all the openings by heart.

And now, with one of my students, in the context of Russian culture, a conversation started about who is currently the strongest in chess. I came home, googled it, went on chess.com… and here I still am.

“Long ago, when people wrote each other paper letters and having a telephone in one’s apartment was considered a luxury; when a simple computer processor occupied my father’s entire office … when Frederic Friedel was only beginning to dream of “Fritz”, and Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik still could not find a way to solve the problem of creating artificial intelligence — back then, people, including chess players, for lack of anything better, used their own heads to think.”

— The Chebanenko Slav According to Bologan, 2008

And don’t forget — chess is a sport !

A very Injury-prone one, actually :

you can easily fall asleep and poke your eye on the queen .

Sofiah_Ge