Adult Improver no more

I haven't played much chess for the past three months. I'll skip the details, but basically life intervened and I didn't have the time. When I did have time I was too physically and mentally tired to take on the challenge. I played a little bit of blitz and bullet chess but not even much of that. I don't see my life situation changing for the foreseeable future, so I guess I can't be considered an Adult Improver anymore.

I never liked the term "Adult Improver" anyway. Until the past three months I've played and studied chess almost daily for the past four years, and other than some progress in that first year I'm not one bit better today than I was then. Whatever you want to call me, "improver" does not seem accurate.

I'm surprised at how quickly my interest in chess waned once I stopped playing every day. I missed it a lot at first, and was frustrated that my schedule didn't allow me to squeeze chess in. But now I don't even have much desire to play. This has happened to me several times in the course of my chess life, where I'll stop playing for awhile, usually several years, and then eventually come back to it. When it has, I've always regretted stopping, figuring that if I had kept going I would have become a much better player. I no longer think that. I think I've basically maxed out on chess proficiency. For years I've been doing pretty much everything people say you should do in order to improve other than hiring a coach, but despite spending enormous amounts of time on it I haven't gotten any better. I think I've reached my final plateau, the one I'm never going to get over no matter what I do.

In some ways this is liberating. Chess is a game, and more than anything else it should be fun. It is fun, but sometimes we ruin the fun by putting expectations on ourselves and getting hung up on comparing our abilities to others and that sort of thing. It's probably true that now that I've stopped playing and studying chess regularly I'll get worse, but you know what? I don't care. If this is as good as I'm ever going to be, then it's not worth spending all that time and effort on it. When I play chess it should be because it's fun to play chess. If I'm not having fun then there's no point to any of it.

In the past year I've played more casual slow (mostly untimed) OTB chess and find that a better experience than studying my games and doing tactics. Unfortunately the same life changes that made me give up daily chess study are making it difficult to get to in-person chess too, but I'm going to keep trying to make time for that. No doubt the lack of regular study will prevent me from getting any better, but I wasn't getting any better anyway. In fact at my age (53) I was probably only going to get worse despite the work I was doing. I'll get worse even faster without it, but I don't think I'm losing out on anything.

I might write the occasional blog entry when I have something to say. Lately, I don't. I'm not giving up chess, I'm just only going to play when I feel like it rather than because I'm supposed to. It's okay not to play chess all the time, and I have other interests.

You know what else is fun? Pinball. I started playing pinball recently and found that I'm no better at that than I am at chess (my old-man reaction times don't help), and yet I like that too. It would be nice if sometime I developed an interest in something I was good at, but in the meantime at least I'm enjoying myself.