Eventually, I went back to playing chess.

I tried getting into something different — GTA V, Borderlands 3 — and it was fun too... but time is limited, and I find it much more convenient to be able to play on the fly, even in whatever little free time I have, without having to sit around waiting for loading screens.

On chess.com, I connect, start searching for a game... and play.

10 minutes at most and the game is over.

In a more complex game, what can I do in 10 minutes? Maybe I can barely get the first mission started...

And so I decided to go back to chess and put the other games aside for a while; I'm not saying I won't play anything else anymore — I'm still playing through the story mode in Borderlands 3 and I'd like to finish it — but in practice, they'll only get the scraps of the scraps... of the scraps of my free time.

ELO

Another reason is that whenever I play chess with a bit more consistency, I usually manage to slowly improve my ELO rating.

After a break, I actually always lose quite a few points during my first few games... but as I get back into the swing of things, I tend to recover them and, if I stick with it, I can even set new personal bests.

And lately, in Blitz (5+0), I've been getting close to my ATH (1608).

Right now I'm at 1560, after winning an extremely chaotic game full of blunders.

Luckily, my opponent blundered even more badly than I did, capturing one of my pieces while I was threatening checkmate on the next move.

The position was actually quite complicated, and with little time left on the clock, finding the right move isn't easy... but in the end, I'm perfectly happy with that, since his mistake allowed me to finish the game in style and get a little closer to 1600.

Over the next few days I'll keep playing and pushing, trying to break past that rating again.

I probably won't be able to settle permanently around 1600, but simply reaching that rating again would already be nice.

Chess on Hive

One day I'd also like to take part in one of the tournaments organized here on Hive, where I've seen that the ELO ratings seem to be around 1500-1800, with a few peaks around 2000.

For now, those numbers are a little too difficult to take on, but someday... who knows!

One of the nice things about chess, as with almost every game I know, is that with practice and experience you tend to keep making progress, so the room for improvement is usually fairly large and, given enough hours and a bit of dedication, it's not difficult to reach milestones that once seemed impossibly far away!

cover image made with GIMP

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