What is your story? How did you start playing chess? What have you, and are you doing in chess?

What is our shared human experience with this game? What have we done? Where are we going? 

Just as a way to think of this.

I am from ...

I learned to play chess ...

In the past I have done the following chess related activities ...

Currently I am doing the following chess activities ...

I grew up in the small town of Marshall Missouri USA. My older brother taught me to play chess during the Bobby Fisher boom. I picked it back up while in my 30's. A 6 month USCF membership in the ChessMaster 2000 box opened the door to the world of chess I never knew existed. Laying in a hospital bed having had a cancer removed from the side of my head I decided chess was something I wanted to get better at. I've served on the Missouri Chess Association board, directed chess tournaments. Including the New Mexico, and Missouri Opens. Currently I play a lot online. I organize and direct over the board tournaments. I admin a couple of Chess.com clubs. I am thankful to have someone to play against. For many years after my brother stopped playing me I had no one to play. I am so glad you're all here.

I am from Cheshire, England. My mother taught me to play chess when I was seven or eight years old, around 1970. I played (terribly) in a couple of tournaments when I was young, but found the whole thing too time-consuming, until the dawn of the internet and the launch of the eponymous chess club, of which I was one of the early members. I played (a tiny bit less terribly) on there against some well-known people. Chess took a back seat for quite a while after that, while other aspects of life took hold. I always promised myself I would return to chess once retired. In the event, even though I retired in my early forties, that didn't really happen, because my life was too full - friends, dogs, wife increasingly disabled with MS, backgammon, stuff... - but things have thinned out somewhat now, so I have a little time to devote to chess once more. Hunting around for a good online venue (I am a longterm member of almost all of them, some of which I don't even remember joining, it's so long ago!), I took at fresh look at Chess.com and seem to have settled here. I find chess is bad for my tinnitus (bane of my life), but ho hum. I have been very competitive most of my life, but made a conscious decision when returning to chess simply to enjoy it instead of constantly pushing for a higher rating and better standard. I think my chess will improve organically while I do some gentle learning (largely from Chess.com's free resources) and enjoy the gameplay. Life's not all about fighting, pushing and relentless improvement. One of the beauties of chess is that it can be enjoyed by people of all standards. Sometimes there is more delight in a so-so player creating a simple tactic or two than there is in a perfectly played game with no errors. Sorry if this appears as a wall of text - I think the app ignores formatting.

An awesome sharing of your story. Thanks @ChesterDog. 

I'm from Washington State in the U.S. My dad taught me to play when I was 8. The set we had was a plastic Renaissance set with figures of people and it really sparked my imagination. I played off and on but didn't really improve much until I was out of college and bought a copy of Chess Life magazine. I had no idea the USCF existed until then. I became a member and started to play correspondence tournaments and a few OTB tournaments. Loved it!

When I wrote my first book there was something about it that just didn't work. It went into a drawer and remains out of sight. I wondered what I wanted to read about and thought about chess. I wrote some short stories for the now defunct chess magazine, SQUARES and my first published novel was Even Dead Men Play Chess and two more in the series followed, The Grandmaster's King and Till Tomorrow, with a fourth book on the way.

Even though I'm just as average player, I spent a few semesters teaching chess to elementary kids and I believe it's a great benefit to cognitive thought. Chess is one of those rare things in life that you don't really have to be great at in order to enjoy. In fact, one of my favorite games is one that I lost, but I learned a great deal from it!

Enjoy!

Thanks @john_chandler. I have grandkids now I'm trying to teach. I hope someday they remember that we had that time together.

@ChessAuthor like you I think of chess as mental exercise. Thanks for sharing your story.

Hi guys!

From California USA here, but grew up on the east coast.

I learned to play chess with my son (if I don't count the semi-legal chess that I played while in HS) while playing a PC game called Majestic Chess.

Not much chess history since son & I started about a yr ago.  But in HS, I "learned" and "played" during lunch for about about 3 months (I quit chess entirely when I lost at a tournament.  It was pretty sad/funny, I claimed opponent castling as illegal and refused to promote her pawn to a queen because she still had a queen on the board.  I just didn't know all the rules because we just played among friends during lunch and nobody knew how to play.

Thanks to my son, I rediscovered chess.  I was really happy when he claimed his first real victory over me many months ago (now, it is not much trouble for him to dispatch me).  

My work is my hobby, i.e. I program for fun.  Like an artist who paints for fun.  So, my chess related activities tend to be involved in mixing chess hobby with programming hobby.  Currently, I'm working on a cheap version of the DGT eboard so that scholastic tournaments in the US and equip all their young players who can't write very well with it.  I was working very hard on it, but my son writes well enough now to keep score so no longer need such a device.

I think my next chess project will be to start a chess club at son's school to recruit players his grade so that he'll have schoolmates/classmates at the tournaments.  But that's a big commitment, so still thinking about it.

My dad taught me to play chess when i was 8 years old. Then he proceeded to beat me 100 games in a row. [learned from this that chess is a game of skill]

Then i drew a game and about 3 games later--actually won a game!

Gradually my chess improved and by age 9--i was winning almost every game and my dad quit playing me.

Back then there was no chess in schools. However some of the best adult players in Decatur Illinois would play me and i held my own.

Flash forward to when i was age 15. I was hired as Chess Instructor for the City of Decatur Illinois! This was during two summers where i would ride my motor scooter to various playgrounds to play against and teach hundreds of kids aged 7 to 13. Most often i would arrive at a school playground and 10 or 11 kids would be sitting at park benches and i would play simultaneous. During the two summers out of maybe 9000 games-i only lost 1.

In 1959 [at age 18] I played in the US Open in Omaha Nebraska for my very first tournament. At the end of 12 games my USCF rating was above 1800.

Later [in the year 1973] i played some strong masters and 1 gm [who i beat] and had a performance rating of 2439 for the whole year [15 games] After 1973 never played USCF over the board again.

But postal chess or chess by mail [or correspondence chess]  was my main interest and the kind of chess i could play best. Have a current [not active] rating of 2530 [or something like that]

Still play some vote chess on chess.com. Vote chess is similar to correspondence chess [which is my speciality]

I can relate to this.

When I first became interested, all I wanted to do was play, I was completely obsessed. You could have broken into my bedroom and woken me up at 3 in the morning and offered a game and I'd have been happy to play.

*I am from India. *My elder brother taught me chess at age 8. *Some rules are entirely different from now...can be a local rules. *I play chess in school tournament at the age 12,13,15 & won 1st prize in two of them. *Noone play strong enough at that time,chess is also not so popular in my locality. *One day,my friend play a chess with me,since beats me in every game I played & commented that He can win 100/100 games if I will be his opponent,because I am too weak. *I left chess for 3 years. *After class 10 I suddenly got an interested in game & I know new rules & players.What is happening in chess world.?etc. *I play in local tournament where I scored 3.5/6 *Getting to play online games here & other websites. *Improving alot. *Now I know I can beat my friend easily. *Hope my journey will go on. 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊 Thanks!

I had played chess since my father taught me around age 5 and became good enough to win my high school's championship tournament - done casually and without clocks and then beat people in casual play in college.

But I had NEVER known anything about real rated chess with chess clocks, etc. and never knew about openings, tactics, strategy, etc.

Then, I got a scholarship/teaching assistantship to graduate school in chemistry at IIT in Chicago. I was paid from Sept-May each year, enough to live on, but had to work the summers doing research with NO pay.  In 1974, I calculated at the beginning of August that I only had $7 to spend for fun until the next school year's first paycheck came in September.  I was in a bookstore and stumbled across Chess for Match Players, by William Winter.  There were all those strange names I saw in newpaper chess reports and puzzles: Ruy Lopez, Sicilian Defense, etc.  So I decided my fun would be studying Winter's book for the month!

That opened up OTB chess for me.  After grad school I began playing and, by 1978, I reached the 1400's OTB and 2116 in correspondence chess - in pre-home-computer days.

Into the '90's I had less time to play chess because I had taken over a demanding teaching position and also coached varsity sports teams. Nevertheless, I was able to reach a 1563 OTB rating.  An Achilles Tendon injury took me away from sports teams in the '90's and some of my students asked me to start a competitive chess club at the school.  I did. 18 months later we won the county championship. Two years later we were still the county champs and also 3rd in the state championships.

If I didn't have major problems seeing patterns and avoiding blunders, I expect my rating would be at least in the high 1700's.  In my OTB games in the '90's thru 2000, I never lost a game to anyone under 1600.  But most of my games were against higher rated players and I blundered away many games and was awful as Black, not realizing I needed to be aggressive: you can't win at that level simply by being good at defense!

After 2000, I returned to coaching varsity sports and turned the chess club to an assistant who, by 2002, I turned the club over to.  After that, I decided to learn to play classical piano and chess was pushed in the background.

At the beginning of 2017, retired and 66, I realized it the lack of strong mental challenges was not going to keep my mind sharp, so I got back into chess.  I playing mostly daily games for Team USA, Team USA Southeast, and Team Maryland.  After I become better at seeing the patterns and avoiding blunders, I expect to play more rapid and longer games.

I'm currently trying to improve my tactics knowledge, pattern recognition, and ability to put plans together.  My tactics progress at chesstempo shows I'm making progress and that you can teach an old dog new tricks:

I am so happy with your responses. I've read each one. I found every story interesting. Thank you for sharing. You have touched me through this cold inhuman medium. I think it is good to realize that while we come here to compete. We are all human beings, with different yet similar experiences. It's wonderful that we can reach each other around the world through this site. Let's not forget that there is another person on the other end of each and every interaction here. You are all so wonderful. Thanks again.

I began playing in primary school, aged 8, I was vice captain of the school team for two years and played for a town across the country for 3 years. From 12 I didn't play at all other than sporadic otb games against people who owned sets in their house. Then last summer I downloaded the app and started playing again. So basically I went from not losing a game in about 20 years to losing hundreds in the last 6 month haha

My story is already on the thread but I, too, would just like to thank Randy for starting it. It makes for interesting reading and is such a welcome relief from the background nonsense with which the forum seems plagued.

Thanks @ChesterDog. I hope we get more people to share. Maybe I should have titled it "Can I get 10,000 replies to this post?" :-)