Final Thoughts on US Class Championship

The last time I played in an OTB tournament, I was in 6th grade.  The tournament was a lunch-time event involving a handful of students.  I won that tournament.  This tournament was essentially my first real-live chess event I've ever participated in.  To say the least, it was fascinating.

It amazes me that in all my interactions with so many people in my neighborhood, church, work and school that I don't regularly find serious chess players.  I mean, chess is a very popular game and has a huge following, but I've never found that one friend who will stay up til midnight playing chess with you.  When we moved to Houston, I began in earnest to ask more often if people actively played chess.  Miraculously, I've been able to find a couple of gentleman who play.  One goes to my church and the other I met at at chess meetup.

Then I go to this tournament and it's as if I've finally found the party after searching all these years.  The best thing I liked about the tournament was simply talking to others about the game - knowing that there are other people like me who have the same crazy delusions about getting better at this game.  Getting the prize money wasn't the most valuable thing I got - rather it was the experience of the event ... one that I'll never forget the rest of my life.  It was exchanging contact info with other people and meeting fellow chess bloggers.

I was a little apprehensive about the tournament at first, but now all that anxiety is gone and I'm planning which tournament I want to sign up for next.  This addiction has gone to the next level.

Chess Around the Net

In this article, the author discusses the beginning of on-line addictions ... namely chess and web surfing. With regard to playing chess he says,

If I was on a roll then I couldn’t stop. And if I was losing, I’d have to keep playing until I started winning again. I’d have intermittent breaks for “meet­ings” with people who thought they were my co-workers. I’d keep playing until midnight, 1am, 2am, all night sometimes, and stumble home just to change clothes. It was ugly and I was scared.

Scared because the truth finally hit me. It was never going away. It’s not as if this internet chess club was a temporary thing. This was here for ever and it was only going to get worse.

Finally, a friend of mine helped wean me off the online chess server. He showed me a piece of software called Mosaic, which could download and format images and text off the internet. Also audio, but only if you wanted to wait two hours for a download. The worldwide web was just starting and there were maybe a few hundred websites at the time.

He continues,

During this period, I would take the occasional bathroom break from my
chess games and I’d see another guy wandering the halls around midnight or so. He told me he was working on something that could read text and catalogue it and he was testing it out by retrieving pages from the few websites there were. He was hoping for government funding so he could work on his little hobby during the day.

“Yeah, right,” I thought to myself as I locked my office door behind me for another session of one-minute chess. “Good luck with that.”

He went back to his computer, which was named lycos.cs.cmu.edu and eventually became the computer for the search engine he created, Lycos. It helped his net worth top 9 figures by 1997.

He eventually relates his story to being "one click away from internet fortune."

This is quite a cool chess picture ... it's literally cool.

A landscaping idea for my backyard.