Well that was exciting. Please don’t too critical. This is my first effort to produce and post a video and it is only the introduction!
I put a short, short, short (short than me – a low bar indeed!) intro with me in it. I’ve always been camera shy so it was a stretch. Now I did try to video tape the whole intro and it was awful. I couldn’t stand to watch it to edit it. So instead I chose to narrate, sparring y’all from having to watch me struggle through the whole THREE MINUTES or so.
Now for the meat of what I am up to…
From here on out, I plan on focusing on some of the resources I enjoy using in the internet. First up will be online chess resources. For those of you rolling your eyes, please bear with me for a minute. First of all, I’m getting back into chess for a very good reason – to fight the aging process! Not only does chess promote logical and orderly thought processes but playing rated games is a decent benchmark to gauge one’s ability to think. It doesn’t matter if you are a 800 (under 1000 is considered a beginner) rated player or 2000 and above (expert to grandmaster). Once your rating is established and you play on some sort of regular basis, you can at least know if you are getting staying the same, improving, or God help us, declining. I say it’s better to know than not know.
Beyond that, chess is a lot of fun! While I went for years without playing, I’d still solve some puzzles from time to time, like the one in my last post. I don’t know of any other game where anyone can study games by the best of the best players for the past 100+ years and learn from them. Even better, anyone can pit their skills against these top players by trying to anticipate how they moved. Modern chess technology makes this a breeze to do. (I’ll show you how to do this in an upcoming video).
Today’s chess is far more than just some boring old board game. Of course you can still play face to face across the kitchen table, in a coffee shop, or in the park, but your options don’t end there. Chess can be played literally anywhere – including on your cell phone or your computer. You can always find someone to play against day or night, or play against a computer. Don’t let this scare you as you can choose the level you lay the computer at so even mediocre players have a good chance at winning. Your chess game need not be slow either. While I prefer longer games – even correspondence games, with 2-5 days allowed between moves than can take days or even weeks to complete, you can play a game in under two minutes if you so choose or any time limit in-between. So whether you like to play fast or slow, no matter if you are a great player or just s0-so, you can find games to suit your style and your mood.
So here’s my debut on Rumble and YouTube (same video, different hosts). I’ve got a couple more ready to que up. My next video will be an overview of online chess resources. After that, I’ll start to dig into the most amazing online chess resource I’ve ever seen. It is so chock full of chess stuff, it will take several videos to explore it all. A warning here: you just might find some resources so addicting that you forget to come back to see what else there is!
