Haven’t we all tried playing chess at least once in our life? At first we’re overwhelmed from all the various pieces and their seemingly complicated movements. But then as you progress you slowly grasp the concept and are soon sucked in by the game and it’s addicting characteristics. Well this is how it went for me at least; but I’m sure there are a few people who stayed away from the game, daunted from it’s complicated strategies.
I picked up the game when I was around 12 years old and ever since I’ve been playing competitively in tournaments and casually against friends. The environment around me had made it easy for me in every way to try out the game and even progress in it, with my school providing chess classes and hosting yearly tournaments. The other factor were the people around me who convinced me to give it a shot in the first place. And so I did; I started of by learning where each piece is placed on the board and the two different sides, after that I was able to quickly to memorise each piece and it’s unique movements across the board, and then I moved on to learn checks, checkmates and en passent. Now I had taken my first baby steps in my progression in the game.
Once I had that covered, I started playing against my friends who were of similar level; most of the time we would play with no real strategy in mind and just move our pieces closer to the king, trying to checkmate each other. After several games following a similar pattern, I started to gain confidence in my knowledge of the basics and decided to play a few matches against the top players of my group. Instantly i was beaten by a wave of moves that i had never seen before. I had fallen prey to four-move, three-move and even two-move checkmates! I Remember those matches so clearly where i would sit down play two moves and then my opponent would utter to me “Good Game” or “Well played” and I would look down in confusion of how the game had gotten over so quickly.
Eventually after being beaten countless times by these players, I had picked up the strategies they would use, the opening moves they would play and the blunders they would look for. I soon adapted these moves to my own games and started using them when i played against opponents of similar levels and soon enough i got my first proper win. As i played more and more matches i started to gain motivation to try to at least draw with the top players of my group and with that goal in mind i progressed to the next level by playing online with apps such as chess.com and lichess. This gave me exposure as i began to play against a whole new group of people and soon i learnt more new strategies and improved my ability to think ahead which is what chess is all about. Ready to take it to the next step i began watching matches of the top players in the world such as Magnus carlsen and Hikaru nakamura.
6 months and a several hundred matches later I had improved enough to participate in inter-school tournaments. With each tournament i moved 4 places lower and lower approaching the top 10 bracket.