Return to my childhood
I used to be a very good chess player. Yes, I can see at least one person rolling her eyes and thinking, "used to be?" - but I had an expert rating and perhaps the potential for somewhat more. In high school, my first car gave me access to the Houston Chess Studio, now disappeared in a haze of gentrification. I spent much of a year and a half there, before discovering girls and rather foolishly giving up the game.
So it was with wry amusement that I decided today to play in a nice tournament at Williams - they were having a rated tourney, but they also had a quicker unrated tourney with 60-minute games insetad of 3-hour games, so I decided to take a real weekend day off and play.
It was a lot of fun. The first kid I played was about 12, was clearly intimidated by the clock, touch-move rules, and formal play generally. I won a piece in the first few moves and slowly ground out a larger advantage that culminated in a pretty open-board checkmate. The second game was with an adult who played me pretty well, until he decided to forget about his position and let me push him into a trap. The third game was the best of the three, until he dropped his queen on move 15. So I went 3-0 and took home an opening book as a prize.
I doubt I'll get back into tourney chess - it's a huge time commitment, and one I'm not inclined to make - but it was nice to play seriously and to discover I still have the ability to concentrate on one thing for an hour at a time.
So it was with wry amusement that I decided today to play in a nice tournament at Williams - they were having a rated tourney, but they also had a quicker unrated tourney with 60-minute games insetad of 3-hour games, so I decided to take a real weekend day off and play.
It was a lot of fun. The first kid I played was about 12, was clearly intimidated by the clock, touch-move rules, and formal play generally. I won a piece in the first few moves and slowly ground out a larger advantage that culminated in a pretty open-board checkmate. The second game was with an adult who played me pretty well, until he decided to forget about his position and let me push him into a trap. The third game was the best of the three, until he dropped his queen on move 15. So I went 3-0 and took home an opening book as a prize.
I doubt I'll get back into tourney chess - it's a huge time commitment, and one I'm not inclined to make - but it was nice to play seriously and to discover I still have the ability to concentrate on one thing for an hour at a time.