Pretty much exactly one year ago I started playing chess. My first chess games were played against Crafty, a free computer chess engine. I just looked at the game again and was surprised to see that Crafty played the Scandinavian defense against me. Yes, like so many other beginners I read somewhere that 1. e4 is the way to open a chess game and was probably puzzled by Crafty's 1. ... d5 which immediately challenged my pawn. Of course I made a blunder soon enough and resigned. After going over the game, though, I discovered that the final position was much less bad than I thought. First lesson learnt: Do not give up too early! To my own surprise, I haven't given up playing chess since then.

At first, I played chess because I was looking for some distraction: something that keeps my mind occupied and has nothing to do with my day job. Then it developed from occasional games against the machine to regular games on the Internet, blogging, frustration by frequent all-so-frequent blunders, and the obsession to become a better chess player. Therefore, one may ask if I succeeded with this. Well, it depends... I still play chess more or less regularly, make outrageous blunders, and get frustrated every now and then because chess is so complex that improvement is sluggish at best. Thanks to the many chess bloggers out there, particularly thanks to all the beginning and intermediate players who blog, however, I also know now that this is quite normal and that the road to chess mastery is long and rocky.

While I was looking back, I thought what did I actually do all this time? It seems that I spend (wasted??) an enormous amount of time with chess. To avoid blunders (and of course to punish my blundering opponents) I solved approximately 15000 tactical chess problems - an average of 41 problems a day (Of course a miniscule amount compared to others such as Temposchlucker). I spend countless hours surfing the web hoping for the secret recipe that improves my chess strength effortlessly (Of course I know that there is no such training "secret". But may be I should stop ridiculing people who buy expensive workout equipment that promises huge muscles or weight-loss for just 5min workout per day.) and of course I am also following something like 30-40 chess blogs. I played roughly 70 chess games against the computer, 70 correspondence chess games mostly at ChessWorld but recently also here at SquirrelChess.com, 47 blitz chess games at the Internet Chess Club (ICC), and 25 slower chess games at ICC and FICS. To all people who played chess with me this year: thanks for the nice games! (And for letting me win every now and then :-)

Where did all this get me? Certainly not to chess mastery - yet. And the answer depends very much on the kind of games I am playing. There is a strong correlation between my relative playing strength and the time control. Judging from the fastest games I played, blitz chess games at ICC with 2 12 time control, I should give up chess. My current blitz rating at ICC puts me in the bottom 5% of the population. Things start to look differently if I get more time to think, though. My standard time control rating at ICC puts me in the bottom 30% and given practically infinite thinking time (several days per move) it gets even better: my correspondence chess rating at ChessWorld puts me even just slightly above the average.

But enough of the cold numbers! Let's have some fun and play chess!

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