My Chess Journey

Hello, my name is Shamus Leahy and today I am going to be telling you about my chess journey and learning experience. The way I learned chess was a little unorthodox but the story goes like this. One night around 3 AM, I was just trying to find something to do. I was really bored and thinking about things I’ve always wanted to try but never did. Then I saw in my recommended videos on YouTube a video made by a guy named GothamChess. So I went to check on his videos and see a few videos all following the idea of “Beginner Chess.” These videos instantly sparked my curiosity and I think back to the number of times I’ve seen chess in movies and TV shows. I realized that I don’t even know how the pieces move, I don’t know what chess even is. So this made me even more intrigued by the videos. I click on one. The person in the video starts explaining the basics of Chess. In my head, I’m just thinking about how hard it looks, yes, 5 minutes into the video I already think it’s hard.

After a little time passes, for a lack of better words, it clicks. I suddenly have a slight understanding of how these different pieces move and how they do their job. All these seemingly intricate things, that looked terrifying 10 minutes ago, just makes sense to me. I continue to finish the video and I really want to give playing a chance. I just learned the game and thought that I had it down and that I was going to be beating people left and right. So I look up on a site named Chess.com and a website pops up. I sign up and look at the options to play and it says I can either play online against an AI bot, or puzzles. I selected the AI bot option and clicked on the easiest bot that the Website had to offer. His name was Martin. So Martin and I get to playing and the next thing I know a box popped up on my screen which read, “Martin wins by Checkmate.” This makes me realize I watched an entire video about learning chess and still did not know what checkmate was. Sure I’ve heard of checkmate but I had no idea what it was and how to do it. This got me extremely frustrated but then I look at the clock and it says 6 AM. I stayed up for an additional 3 hours just watching and playing chess while thinking I was never going to play again. So I shut off my computer and went to sleep thinking in my head “well that was a waste of 3 hours” just to only be able to think about Chess.

When I woke up that morning I did my normal routine, checking my phone, eating breakfast, etc. Towards the end of my morning, I remember what I was doing last night. So I went to my room opened my computer and logged into chess.com. I loaded up another game against Martin, and lost again, and again, and again. This happened 15 more times until I was close to slamming my computer shut. But then I remembered what I was missing, I still didn’t know what checkmate was. So I went and found the same video and watched it 3 more times; yet the idea of a checkmate was still a foreign thing to me. After this, I wasn’t angry, I was interested. So I looked up even more videos and played even more games. This continued for almost a week. Then it happened. I finally beat Martin by Checkmate! I was so excited and happy that my week of hard work finally paid off!  I scrolled up in the AI bot selection and I saw how many other Bots there were that were much better than Martin. This didn’t deter me, it made me want to work harder to take down these other higher skilled bots and eventually other people.

This was about 3 months ago and I can safely say that I have improved beyond anything old me would’ve ever thought possible. After I started really getting the basics down and beating higher and higher-skilled AI bots, I finally played my first real-life over-the-board game with a real person. Somehow, I won. I kept playing, and not just the same person. I brought in more and more of my friends. I kept improving and kept playing. I started reading about chess. I basically became obsessed over chess. But now I’ve started to really feel confident in my game and it made me feel like all my hard work is finally starting to show. I am still trying to get better and I will always have things to get better at with this game. That’s one of the many things I love about chess. I will never be the best I can be, I can always improve. 

This has been my experience with playing and learning chess, it’s been exceptionally great. I recommend to anyone reading this to give chess a try because you never know, you might love it.