Everything I Learned In 20 Hours of Playing Chess During The COVID-19 Lockdown ♞

1 King, 1 Queen, 2 Bishops, 2 Knights, 2 Rooks and 8 Pawns on either side of an 8x8 board are ready for battle. One set is black. The other white.

White plays the first move, and the game is on.

I have never actually played chess seriously until now. I’ve always known the rules of the game, but never played more than a few games in any given year. I’ve definitely never trained to play chess. (Until last week, I didn’t even know what a “fork” was.)

A few weeks ago, at the tail end of the first week of quarantine, an off hand remark by a friend, let’s call him Zach, piqued my interest. “So you guys taking up any hobbies during quarantine?” he said.

Hmmhh… 🤔

With all the chaos of COVID-19 swirling around in my head lately… between adjusting to the shift from a traditional desk job in an office to a recommended (then mandatory) policy to WFH, scrambling to buy some face masks and hand sanitizers, ordering essential supplies for an unknown period of lockdown, and reflexively tracking the exponential progress of the deadly confirmed case & confirmed death curves of this novel virus… I hadn’t taken a moment to reflect on this (or any other) question.

So what am I going to do with my time now? Surely, I should do something, right? I have more time now, don’t I? At the very least, it’d be nice to get my mind off of COVID-19.

I don’t know why, but I didn’t have to think about which hobbies I wanted to pick up during quarantine. I just knew somehow. Chess and piano!

We’ll talk about piano another time. Let’s focus on chess today.

Now almost 3 weeks later, I have played 20 hours of chess on the lichess app and loving it.

I have played 273 games. They’ve all been 3 minute blitz chess matches, where each player has a total of 3 minutes to make their moves. If your clock runs out, you lose. The goal is to either MATE your opponent or have their clock run out. ♞

20 hours of chess.
112 games won.
154 games lost.
7 draws.

Not too shabby.

I won 41% of games. Obviously that’s not great, but I am pleased by my steady progress. It’s a low bar, but I can confidently say that I am better than I have ever been at chess.

In just 20 hours.

Oh wait. There’s one more thing — my rating.

My current rating is 994.87 for Blitz games. That puts me at 4.6 percentile.

Yep, 4.6 percentile.

Even my SATs weren’t that bad. ;)

My current ranking puts me ahead of only 4.6% other players on lichess at blitz chess.

Frankly it seems like an accurate reflection of my skill level at the moment.

The World Champion

Magnus Carlsen, the chess world champion from Norway, is a young chess savant. He’s quite the contrast to India’s only internationally chess player (that I’m aware of), Vishy Anand. Vishy’s serious and I can’t picture him wearing anything other than a button up shirt. Magnus is often in a t-shirt or a snazzy blazer cracking jokes. Magnus became world champion in 2013 when he defeated Vishy. It’s been 7 years and Magnus has defended his title several times and is still the world champion.

What are the THREE things you need to do during the opening (aka, beginning) of every chess game?

1. Develop your pieces.
2. Get your king to safety
3. Fight for the central squares — there are 4 of them!

What are some things I have noticed and learned in my first 20 hours?

1. There’s a noticeable difference in skill among players with even slightly different ratings — even if it’s just 20 or 50 points.
2. In the opening on my games, the pawns and knights play an important role to fight for the central squares.
3. Toward the middle and end of my games, the knights take a back seat (if they’re even in the game at that point) and I let my rooks do the damage, followed closely by bishops.
4. It feels amazing when you check mate an opponent with a pre-meditated series of moves. I can’t describe it anything other than beautiful.
5. There are traps you can easily fall into if you aren’t aware of certain combinations of moves or board positions. And you can just as easily, set traps for your less experienced opponents.

Highlight Reel?

• My most recent game. Solid start. I blundered my rook on move 12. Steadily took opponent’s pawns around the castled king. Beautifully forked his king and rook with my knight on move 26. That was a check, so when the king moved, I took down the rook. I was in control at this point. Towards move 41, it was a pretty even game. Only the kings and queens were in the game, but I had the advantage with 4 pawn vs only 1. Although I eventually won on move 50 when the opponent ran out of time, my last move was a mis-click. I meant to take the queen (D8) with my queen, but with the pressure of the clock counting down, I clicked the wrong square. I won regardless, but it would have been nicer to win with a MATE instead of them running out of time. Great game because it was a grind. 😎

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Blitz Chess * smokeyowl vs lacave

Date "2020.04.07"lichess.org

• What happens when you play a less experienced player and lay a trap? They resign in 4 moves. 😉

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Blitz Chess * smokeyowl vs Diffule

smokeyowl (966) plays Diffule (852) lichess.org

• I was the patsy in this game. I had no idea how to handle this aggressive opening after the first couple moves. I got MATED in 5 moves. 🤦

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Blitz Chess * vivek131 vs smokeyowl

smokeyowl (983) plays vivek131 (972) lichess.org

So what next?

1. Continue playing chess regularly.
2. By the next milestone (50 hours), I would like to get and stay above the 1100 rating. That’s the 9%’ile.
3. Stretch goal: 1250 rating, which would put me at the 20%’ile.
4. The chart above levels off at the 1300 mark. There’s a plateau between 1300 and 1800, which suggests that a lot of players reach their chess limits here. Only 30% of players are ranked higher than 1800, as of today.