The Quest begins (not quite, perhaps later!)

Finally decided to become a Knight Errant, and join the blogging community. Why?

I’ve been playing chess online for a while, became quite serious about a year ago, bought Nimzowitsch’s My System, and my rating went up over 150 points. However, there was way too much that I didn’t quite understand. I continued to purchase books on chess, and have come to realise that while I manage to grasp a lot of the concepts, I can’t always apply them in my games. Then I found out about Michael de la Maza’s system. While I must admit that I have been strongly anti-de la Maza for a long time, for the usual reasons such as “It takes the fun out of chess, it’s unrealistic to expect someone with a full time job to finish the circles, where’s Mr de la Maza now?” and so on, I still read both his articles (I have read a lot about chess in the last few months, more on that later). And the bottom line is, a lot of what he says started to make sense to me. Almost all the games that I win or lose are for tactical reasons, where either my opponent or myself fails to notice a 1, 2, or 3 move combination. While Nimzowitsch managed to get me obsessed with chess, and took my online rating up from 1550 to 1700+, I still manage to get into embarrassing losses.

But I hate solving chess puzzles, because it never seemed very practical to me. Give me a position, tell me it’s a puzzle, and I’ll automatically start looking for a mate in 2 or something similar. But if I ever get into an identical position in a game, it’s highly unlikely that I would be looking for the mate in 2. Not sure if I managed to get my point across there, what I meant is that while solving puzzles, we specifically look for sacrifices and so on which lead to mates, but during a game never think of these things.

But as I discovered the Knights Errant and their blogs online, I was convinced. It all seemed to make sense. All that stuff about pattern recognition and what not. More than that, I realised that I would be able to share my experiences, my progress, and my frustrations with other people who were either going through or had already completed the process. The de la Maza program can be a very lonely thing, and I doubt that I would be able to go through even 10% of it on my own. I’ve been trying to lose weight for several years now, with no progress, so I don’t think I’m disciplined enough for a program like this. That’s where the Knights come in. I believe that if I record my thoughts and progress each day, and I know that there will be people tracking my progress, I am more likely to stick to the program. Also, when I went through the blogs of some of the Knights, it really inspired me and made me realise that it is actually possible to complete. In particular, going through the blog of Pale Morning Dun was a fabulous experience for me, I read all the posts in 2-3 days. I am now going through the blog of Man de la Maza (I’ve read upto November 2004 so far). I think reading about other people’s experiences and advice and suggestions on how they finished the program will help me tremendously. I hope one day someone somewhere will have a similar reaction to my own blog.