Pieces of My Chess Story: A Personal Reflection

I dove into the world of chess during the Covid era. There was a chess boom back then due to the highly popular Netflix Show: "The Queen's Gambit". I had played a little in my childhood, so all I knew were the basics.

When I was registering an account on chess.com, I remember thinking, "I'm definitely gonna get addicted to this stupid board game." And... I was right. The pure competition it provides is what makes the game extremely addictive. There is literally 0 luck involved; so if you lose, you made a mistake at some point.

Being very competitive, I'd be furious with myself for losing --which happened pretty often. This meant that I had to study the game via youtube videos/lessons, memorize openings, and solve puzzles to improve. You still have to play online games for experience, but studying the game is the most cruical part. If you don't study, you'll barely gain rating in the long run.

This cycle of studying and playing went on for months. I was improving really fast though, which was encouraging. I would say I improved extremely fast compared to most people. In fact, my rapid/blitz/bullet ratings skyrocketed in one year. For instance, I went from 700 blitz to 2300. Essentialy I went from being a casual player to being in the top 0.1% in blitz, bullet, and rapid. I was #2000 in bullet (topped my rating at around 2500) at some point on chess.com out of millions of players. I've beaten Grandmasters, International Masters, etc. I even played in a IRL tournament in 2022, so I was all in. And then... I stopped playing competitively.

Why did I stop playing? Well, the learning curve gets steeper and steeper as you climb up the ladder. As you start playing masters --people that acquired this title by playing a ton of tournaments and also studying the game for years, and even decades-- games get tougher and tougher. This is not the real problem though; the problem is that there's little incentive to keep going. Only the top 50 players make reasonable money playing chess and they have to constantly study chess to keep up with others; it's their full time job. Even then it's not guaranteed. You might lose your form and never get invited to top tournaments ever again. There's a saying by Paul Morphy --greatest chess player of his time-- that goes, "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." Things have changed since then, but the point still stands...

I am still inspired by the GOAT-Magnus Carlsen, and his unique intelligence. I like watching highlights of his games sometimes. His life was definitely not wasted playing chess; rather, he was born to play chess and dominate.

I still play casual online games from time to time, but I've stopped studying the game and like I mentioned earlier, you can't improve at chess without studying the game.

Who knows what the future holds though...

---My chess.com username is ACAT_1. You can add me there!---