How I Started
As far as I can remember, I probably first started playing chess in my primary school’s chess club. But at some point, basketball and the high school entrance exam at the time started taking up almost all of my time, and chess slowly disappeared from my life.
Then, when I moved on to high school, chess came back. I started playing in inter-school tournaments again.
If you have never played in a team chess tournament before, I should say that they have a very interesting feel to them. Sometimes the decision between taking a draw or continuing to defend a bit longer for the chance that your opponent might make a mistake depends entirely on your teammates’ games. So even while playing your own game, you often have to keep an eye on the other boards.
Let’s start by looking at one of the games I remember from high school.
Some of my best chess memories from high school come not from official games, but from the games we played during lunch breaks. Once we got so absorbed in a chess game that we did not hear the bell, missed two classes, and got a proper scolding. Looking back, I don’t think I regret it that much.
Later on at Warwick, chess became one of the best parts of my university life. The chess club had tournaments every two weeks, and those evenings are among my favourite memories from those years. Everyone was very friendly, apart from the semi-serious atmosphere that suddenly appeared on tournament days 😂.
Some weeks we would also do Chess.com Puzzle Rush Survival together. In this mode, you solve increasingly difficult puzzles without a time limit. We almost even reached 60 a few times.
More recently, I also had the chance to play for UCL’s chess team.
Time Controls
I still have a lot of respect for classical chess, but it requires a kind of time and mental energy that I do not always have anymore.
These days I enjoy rapid chess more, especially 15+10. It is long enough that you can actually think, but not so long that the game takes over your entire afternoon. For me, this is probably the best balance between quality and practicality.
I am not extremely fond of playing blitz (watching it is very fun, though that is a different story), but I still play it often enough, mostly 3+0 online and 3+2 over the board. Because it is by far the most practical format.
The 3+0 time control in particular takes a lot away from the endgame experience. Most endgames simply turn into a flagging race. You might have built up a nice advantage throughout the whole game, but in the end it can come down to whose mouse skills are better.
This game is one of the online blitz games I played against a friend I met at Warwick. The time control is also a little unusual: 5+1.
Study Resources
One of the questions I get most often is this: “How do I improve at chess?”
To be honest, I have not read that many chess books. The main exception is tactics books, especially the kind that make you solve puzzle after puzzle. Of course, I have read some classics too; Fischer’s My 60 Memorable Games and Nimzowitsch’s My System come to mind. Both definitely affected the way I look at chess.
Saint Louis Chess Club’s YouTube channel was an absolute gold mine for me. I grew up watching lectures by Ben Finegold and Yasser Seirawan, and I think those lectures seriously shaped the way I approach chess. They helped me learn how strong players talk to themselves during a game.
The other thing I always recommend is solving lots of tactics. But rather than solving tactics completely at random, I found it much more useful to study them by theme. When you isolate and study a motif, you start seeing it much faster in real games.
I would also definitely recommend Daniel Naroditsky’s YouTube channel. Naroditsky passed away last year, and it was a huge loss for the chess world. Growing up, there were so many times when I would watch his speedrun videos or streams and completely lose track of time. What I especially liked about him was that he genuinely cared about players of every level. In addition to videos on top-level games, he also made content for beginner and intermediate players.
What Chess Tells You About Yourself
One of the strangest things about chess is that as you get stronger, it reveals certain parts of your personality.
I am an extremely optimistic person. Chess made me realise this more clearly than almost anything else. It is funny to me that I had not fully noticed it outside the board, but in chess it became impossible not to see.
There is a very concrete anecdote behind this. Toward the end of high school, I was playing in a tournament and we reached a position that was almost completely drawn. It was an equal-pawn knight-versus-bishop endgame; objectively, if anyone was going to win, it was my opponent. My opponent offered a draw, and I declined.
Very quickly, I realised I was playing a dangerous game.
Luckily, I eventually managed to save the draw. But when we analysed the position after the game, my opponent looked genuinely confused. He could not understand why I had kept playing.
Most people would probably look at that position and say, “okay, there is nothing here.” But I genuinely still believed something could happen.
Of course, I lost a few games because of this kind of behaviour. And I can assure you, when a position is completely drawn, there are few things more painful than false optimism pushing you to overpress, only for your position to suddenly become lost.
On the other hand, this optimism also gives me a lot of resilience. Even in lost positions, my brain often refuses to accept that the game is completely over. So I keep looking for the last way to make my opponent’s life a little bit harder.
Chess also made me realise over time that I had become more patient. When I was younger, I always thought I had to play sharp, aggressive openings. I wanted complications, tactics, and attacks. A part of me probably thought that “real chess” meant creating chaos on the board.
But as time passed, I realised that I actually felt more at peace in quieter positions. I think that is probably why I started playing the Caro-Kann with Black.
Closing Thought
Chess really is a game that reveals a person’s character. It shows how you react when you are winning, when you are losing, when you are confused, when you are under pressure, when you have too many options, and when you have almost no options left. And for me, that is the most interesting part.