My chess growth over the years

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_{Photo by Mesh from from unsplash}

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I started playing chess towards the end of my secondary (high) school. We were in our final year and we'd just finished one of our major exams. We didn't really have much to do, so we needed something to pass the time away. We read novels, some brought scrabble, whot, and we had a chess set. I liked to read novels, but it wasn't always easy getting my hands on them as the lines were always too long. So I decided to learn chess since a lot of people didn't play. I learnt all the basic moves and began playing. Basically almost all of us were beginners but it was fun to play. Before we knew it almost everyone wanted to play chess, and it became the new craze back then. The board we had wasn't enough so we had to improvise. We'd just fold paper and draw their symbols on the paper that way we could play.

Soon we graduated and we stopped playing. Then one day we chatted and one of us suggested we play online using lichess. We did for some time, but that didn't last long though as now we had external distractions and that stopped us from playing. I stopped playing chess for quite a while, but that changed a couple months after joining hive.

I was wandering around hive when I came across the chess community. I stumbled upon the weekend tournaments and I dusted my lichess account once more and joined the block chain chess team. At the time I had a rating of 1100+ blitz (I majorly only play blitz), and like 1200 in rapid. I lost a lot of matches and could barely compete in the hive chess tournaments, but I didn't let my position in the table stop me, I've been playing every season, and while the hive reward I get at the end of each season was motivation, it definitely wasn't the reason I showed up every week only to lose majority of my games.
It was until the season before the one that just ended when I won a special prize for best performance with respect to rating, that I realized how much I'd actually improved. At the time my rating was around 1400+ or thereabout. Last season I made another great improvement and finally reached the 1500+ rating. Then during the break I managed to reach 1700, but that was short lived as I've fallen back now to 1633 rating which I still feel is great.

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_{Screenshot from Lichess.org}

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Hopefully I can keep playing and learning and who knows, even compete in the top positions very soon.

As you can see from my profile above I don't really play other variants. I think that's an aspect I also need to work on. I'm open to the opinions of all the chess players in the community on how to get better.

Before I round up I'd like to share with you all a few nice games I've played. Thanks to one of @stayoutoftherz's posts I saw the Rosen score tool which I used In finding these games.

This first one was in the hive chess tournament between me and @vasigo.

In this game I played some kind of rushed London system, and things were already going in my favor, but vasigo made things easier by bringing his pawn to h5

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He then proceeded to weaken himself more by moving the f pawn to f6. A few moves later I ended the game

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You can see the full game here

https://lichess.org/I22x55mb#47

I absolutely loved this one.

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In this position I was completely losing. But then after about 15 seconds of calculations and permutations, I played knight h5 sacrificing my knight. He took the bait, which turned out to be a blunder and left me in a completely winning position. I should have mated, but I missed it.

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He eventually resigned a couple moves later after realizing there was no hope.

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Here's the full game

https://lichess.org/ctMG1Lk3/white

Since I started playing chess, it's brought me nothing but fun times and happiness, which is why I'll keep on playing. Thanks for reading

_{10% is going to @chesspricepool}