Starting Out

Well, here it is - the first post in my blog. This blog has it's origins in an ECF Forum post made in response to one of my philosophical improvement threads, from Jonathan Bryant, of the Streatham and Brixton Chess Club Blog: http://www.streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.co.uk/ which I can thoroughly recommend.

It would be remiss of me to start, dear reader(s?) without my chess background present, in which to frame all subsequent progress and regress I experience.

I first learned the game on my sixth birthday, and showed absolutely no skill or ability for it whatsoever. It even took me eight years to beat my father...Thankfully a couple of years before that I had joined the school chess club, and having finished high up in the third division of it one summer, I checked out a few basic primers on the game that summer. It had some effect, certainly: At the start of Year 9 I shot off winning all my games in school, and did the same in the second term in Division 1. Suddenly I was school champion - that was nice.

I entered my first tournament (UK Chess challenge notwithstanding) in March 1999. In a rather brutal display of rapid chess, I achieved a healthily round score of 0, but thankfully was undeterred. I again read some more books that summer, and started to play in the local junior league, and the lowest divisions of the Cumbria League. By the next year I'd improved to the point where I had gone from weakest of the juniors, to one of the strongest, since I won the Cumbria U15 Championship. That was very nice!

I milled about for a couple of years, but had already made sure to get myself an eternal nemesis or two, to add spice to the junior tournaments roster. In fact I played one of my closest competitors about six times in as many weeks. Anyways, I got a first published grade of 41, presumably mostly from the bashings I sustained by many adults, and got it up to 55 the year after. By then I'd entered sixth form (yes, I was a 16 year old with a grade less than four times my age!), and I found a wonderful book - Teach Yourself Better Chess, by Bill Hartston. Suddenly a revolution came about in my thinking, and I went on a tear in the leagues - +17 =3 -7 and a shiny new grade of 107 popped into my lap. 

In between abortive attempts at university (I wholly do not enjoy mortgaging one part of my life to improve another part, among other things), I kept playing, and suffered the arrogance of youth to always see things wrong with opponents' moves, but not myself be able to exploit them. After a few years of this bouncing around the 100s, I came to realise I severely lacked tactical ability. I could always visualise as I wanted to, but of course I was visualising poor moves, and missing the wood for the trees. So I started to do puzzles on Chess Tempo and Chess Tactics Server and started to read a little - some Botvinnik, some Kotov. Kotov I found as harsh as eating nettles - in fact it took me several months to reorganise my thought processes after tackling Think Like a Grandmaster a few years previous. 

By 2008 I had stalled for so long that I wondered whether I'd again ascend anywhere, so I started taking up arbiting work more seriously: got one norm and was helping out with the junior events locally too. That was great fun! I did find another book though - How to Choose a Chess Move, by Soltis. It was 2009, ten years after I started, and after some time in a job where I was contracted to Saturdays (byebye chess!), I had found a stable position which let me play all the games I wanted to. I had by now also started attending our merged Carlisle club at Austin Friars school again, and with the new grades, started off at 129 - not bad really. That year I came 2nd in the city championship, despite being seeded only 7th - thanks in no small part to the above mentioned book; to lots and lots of 30 0 games on Chesscube (which I can unfortunately no longer recommend you use), and lots of practice on the tactics sites I mentioned.

In the years since then, I've been exhaustively reworking my chess ignorance from the base up, with various instructional courses and thought processes, so that if I can gain skill in the future, I'll have a solid grounding of knowledge to work from. This was a brave decision really - in the months leading up to Christmas 2010 I had scored 7.5/10 and beaten two players graded 155. In short, I was often in a groove, but I knew that it couldn't last. Thankfully I was proven right - looking at those games now I can see so many errors and basic mispresumptions that I'm delighted I stopped to build. I'm still building of course - a new grade of 160 in July is a little bit lucky because my previous season wasn't stellar, though coming 2nd at the U160 British Championships in North Shields certainly helped. 

So from now on, any significant training or work on my game will go here, in complement to my now semi-mothballed Youtube Channel. So without further ado, let's begin!