timothyha

♙ I was born in 1972.  My father taught me chess when I was about 9.  Karpov and Korchnoi were playing their matches around that time, and it was all over newspapers.  I learned to read the algebraic notation through their games and joined a chess club in Moscow.  Later we moved back to Vietnam, and I stopped playing until about age 16-17 when my friends and I played chess a lot in school after classes.  Most of the middlegame and endgame patterns were learned by tough practice at that time.  I played some chess at university, too, and then I stopped playing until the age of 40 when I started to play again, this time on chess.com in 2012.  Mostly blitz games at the beginning, but they were time-consuming and distracting from family, so I switched to day-to-day games instead.  My results are stable and I have a good performance record in Team Russia.  I also play in Lichess 45+45 Team League.

♘ In January 2016 I joined a chess club in Auckland, New Zealand, and found OTB (over-the-board) games much more beneficial to the quality of my play.

♗ My FIDE registration was done also in 2016 and since then I started to play both NZCF and FIDE tournaments.

♖ FIDE ID is 12417246 (click here to see the info and up-to-date stats).