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On.
About me and chess and also what I've learned from Ono
On my chess journey so far
My four earliest memories of chess are as follows:
1. That time a classmate bought a 3-in-1 set to school when I was 11 and I looked at it from afar
2. My aunt showing me a chess board around that same age. She had to leave to do something after she started to set up the board and that’s the last time we ever spoke about chess.
3. “Playing chess” with my classmates at around 11. Soon after 1. another classmate bought a chess set to school. We didn’t actually know how to play and all our games ended with lone kings on the board. After randomly moving the lone knights around on the board for a few moments we would agree on a draw. We were in serious need of guidance.
4. Channel surfing and randomly coming across something about chess. In it, Susan Polgar is walking down the street while playing a game of chess with someone over the phone.
All four instances had one thing in common. They left me fascinated. I thought chess was awesome and wanted to learn. It would however take me around 8 years from becoming aware that chess existed to learn the moves – what is perhaps the second most basic thing in chess. The reason for that is because of something that has unfortunately been a common theme throughout my chess journey. I thought it was hard and kept quitting. It now seems absolutely ridiculous that I could have thought that something that is quite easy was hard.
How I came to finally learn the moves is that at around 20 I started going to a school that had a chess club and went to a meeting. One of the members was kind enough to walk me through over the board. I learned a lot of other things in that chess club too. Some of which I’ve realized I have to unlearn to become good at chess. Someone while trying to be helpful told me that if at any point I didn’t know what to do I should just push a pawn. Another person told me that if I wanted to be good at chess simply play a lot of games and solve puzzles and over time my chess ability would increase. That last person’s advice has some truth to it, but it, unfortunately, ended up being part of the reason why I kept quitting. I would play as much as possible – which unfortunately wasn’t a lot, solve puzzles on a random app I downloaded, and even read a chunk of Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess at some point. However, I continued to not get better past what was obvious to me was a very low point despite my lack of rating knowledge. I wasn’t the worse player in the world but I was awful. I concluded that since I was doing what one needed to do in order to become good at chess and I wasn’t improving that meant I was simply incapable of being good at chess.
A few years later in 2017 while attending another school and chess club I was looking for opportunities to play more games and decided to enter my first chess tournament. I would end up entering quite a few. In one I ended up with a king and rook against a lone rook and struggled as I didn’t know what to do. At some point, someone came over to watch. After my opponent – a child clearly just starting out – helped me to checkmate them, the individual looked at me astonished and said – paraphrasing here - “You don’t know how to checkmate with a king and rook?”. I felt the appropriate shame and soon learned. I bought a 3-in-1 set around that time. In another, the under 1600 section got folded into the open section and I played 5 games against opponents with an average rating of 1809.2 and lost all of them. I know that not because I have such a good memory but because I have a FIDE profile. I apparently didn’t play enough FIDE rated games to get a rating. I haven’t entered any tournaments since 2018.
In 2020 I attended a free virtual chess lesson and played a few games online. I lost all of them. Fast forward to December 2022 and aside from losing against the high levels of a chess app and randomly doing a couple of puzzles on occasion I hadn’t done anything chess related in years. I started to wonder to myself what are the chances that I could one day become good at chess if I started proper studying at the age of 29. I did some googling and came across a blog post written by Alex Crompton about how he went from 300 to 1500 ELO –read it here. Reading that post and others helped me to change my mindset. I got myself shiny new online chess accounts, pulled the chess set out of the storage bin, and have done something chess-related every day since. This time around I believe in myself and know that chess improvement is possible for anyone as long as they use good methods and am determined not to quit this time around.
On my free lesson with Ono and my takeaways from reading his blog
At some point, I realized that casually flitting from YouTube video to YouTube video probably wasn't the recipe for long-term success. I did some googling and came across a blog post by Ono. I hesitated to book the free lesson at first because I already knew I couldn't afford a coach. After finding out that the free lesson was now a limited-time offer and after much thinking, I booked the lesson.
I received an email from Ono a couple of minutes before the lesson that said "Hey, I am ready whenever you want to jump into the call :)".
I hopped on and after some introductions, he explained how the lesson would work. He said that normally how the lessons work is that we would only review one game but as this was only a free introductory lesson we would be going to be going through the three games I had linked to in the form as well as doing some exercises.
The bulk of the lesson was carried out in a lichess study. My main takeaways from the lesson are:
- Fear is not a variation.
I had a habit of playing a3(6) and/or h3(6) to avoid having my knight pinned. Ono suggested I break said habit. The reason was that I was basically wasting a move out of fear. - K-MAP
K-MAP (King Safety, Material, Activity, Pawns) is a method of grounding yourself in a position.
My main takeaways from what I've read of the blog so far:
- knowledge of various chess resources and ideas on how to use them
- how to effectively create a study plan
I used Ono's blog and a few other resources to create a study plan which I followed diligently for a couple of weeks and then proceeded to ignore. I’ve since realized that that plan was unrealistic and intend on making another hopefully better plan. I originally wrote this when I was on a streak and considered deleting it. I decided not to as I really did learn how to effectively create a plan and intend on proving such. - I'm not unique.
It wasn't that I was convinced that I was something special. It was that, prior to coming across Ono's blog, the chesspunks community on twitter, and a few adult improver twitch streamers, I didn’t know any adults other than myself who were not capital G great at chess and felt passionate about it. Seeing Ono and others start serious study as adults and improve gave me validation that I should have already had that I wasn't some weirdo tossing time down the drain on some game that I would never be capital G great at. I had often asked myself that if it was highly unlikely that there would ever be a capital G with a capital M beside it before your name, then what was the point.
I've decided that the main points are:
1. To have fun
I know from experience that you don't have to be capital G great at chess to enjoy it. I had previously felt that wasn't enough. It's not chess alone that I felt that way about. I’m trying to let myself enjoy things without thinking too much about certain things.
2. Community
I had fun back when I was able to be a member of a chess club. I’m not currently able to be a member of an in-person club. I’m hoping to find community online.