Chess… It’s that time again


I remember when I was in 6th grade and I told my older brother Robbie “I want to learn chess.  I don’t know how the pieces move or who can kill who.”  His response was “Anyone can kill anyone in chess!”

For whatever reason, that seemed fascinating to me.  After learning the game, I was a casual [i.e. occasional] player (never particularly good of course) until the age of 21 when my younger brother bought an Onyx chess board in Mexico while we were on a short-term mission trip together, and I was reacquainted with the game.

Coming back from the trip, I was interested enough to read my first chess book (cover-to-cover in one sitting at a Barnes & Noble), and that led to a dozen or more other books, coaching a chess club, and 4 years of being a private chess coach for elementary school kids.

But overall, chess and I have had kind of an off-and-on relationship through the years.  I’m either never playing/thinking about chess… or I find myself thinking about and playing it every day.  It’s funny how it can seem so uninteresting to me at certain times of the year and then at other times, it’s so fascinating that I can hardly get enough.  As you may have guessed from the title, I’m going through that phase now.

Another thing I find rather fascinating about chess is how difficult it is to improve beyond a certain level.  I guess it’s probably this way with many sports, but there comes a time when no amount of playing the game results in any noticeable improvement.  And even studying books seems to only push me a tiny bit further.  It sure would be nice to improve by leaps and bounds, but it just seems that the players who improve past the point I’m at now are willing to put in a LOT of effort into their study of the game.

I wonder sometimes if it is actually more fun to be better at the game of chess. Obviously, it’s fun to win and be good at something, but it usually just means I play harder and harder players until I’m only losing as much as I’m winning.

There I go overthinking stuff again.  I forget sometimes that I study chess not to win more games but because I enjoy it.  And really, the better I get at it, the more enjoyable it is even when I don’t win any more games that before.  That’s probably the key point here.  I have experienced much more joy from chess because of all the study.

Ah chess... what a wonderful game. :-)

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