Correspondence chess

Several days ago, @canion challenged me to a game of chess—basically correspondence chess—on chess.com. I’m pretty sure he is beating me right now, but we are just in the middle of the game, so we will have to play it out to be sure.

Simultaneous online play

Tonight I played a real-time game against someone else on chess.com for the first time. I won! Except for the one, slow game with @canion, I haven’t played against a real person in chess for about 20 years. Humans are less predictable than bots, which makes things interesting.

I also found the post-game statistics on the chess.com website to be very interesting. Apparently in my game tonight I made 4 mistakes and 8 blunders, and had 3 missed wins. That means I’m pretty bad at chess! That makes sense to me, considering I just re-started playing about a week ago. To get better, I should probably play more games and then analyze what went wrong in them to figure out what my weaknesses are.

In person play…someday soon

Today I ordered a chess set today—a nice, wooden set with weighted pieces that completely outclasses what we have know and the chess set I grew up with. The board has labeled ranks (1-8) and files (a-g), which will be great for teaching my family how to play. It folds in half and has internal storage for the pieces. It also has two extra queens. No chess set that I’ve ever seen had extra pieces to account for pawn promotion, so this set feels luxurious to me. I promised my wife I will use it to teach her how to play. My kids may be interested, too; I don’t look forward to losing to a four-year-old and a nine-year-old, though!