I loved playing chess with my peers. It was interesting to see other peoples strategies and how we had to adjust them in order to compensate for the time constraints that we put under.

I decided to sign up for the chess meet because I was inspired by Beth’s story in Queen’s Gambit. However, watching chess is very different than playing it. When it was time for me to play chess games I realized that the people who did very well and constantly won had great pattern recognition skills. For example in one of my games my opponent actually told me he had planned out all my possible moves and counter attacks against them in one of the plays! Well, he was a chess geek so I wasn’t surprised. But from this experience I have learnt that playing chess can improve my abstract thinking that can help me in more mathematical based classes as identifying patterns is always important.

This was an interesting event, one that I hadn’t seen offered before: a chess meet! It had individual chess matches between members of the Zoom call, hosted on a website online. There was a logistical preamble to matching up students, and then we were set off to complete the matches with the specific restraints.

For the matches, we had time constraints, so each side had to battle within limits. Myself, I’m very new to chess, so I had some trial and error before I realized some key aspects of the game. Using a pawn to reach the other side creates a new piece, one that is much more powerful: the app allowed me to choose, so I usually chose to add another queen to the board.

Knowing this, my strategy quickly became to just launch my players across the board as quickly as possible. This didn’t work out for me in most matches, because when the time ran out, I was usually way behind in terms of points. I was able to win a match toward the end, though, which felt great!

This past Saturday, I attended the chess meet with GRF Bassel.  To be completely honest, I had never played chess before, so knowing how each piece moves differently was the extent of my knowledge.  I had no particular idea about strategizing to achieve victory.  However, this limitation did not stop me from having fun.  I especially enjoyed watching and spectating other matches when my games were over and trying to learn from what other more experienced people were doing strategy-wise.  Hopefully, next time an event like this happens, I’ll be better and actually know what to do to win!  All in all, it was a great way to have some fun and decompress from the stress of the week.

(Originally posted 3/22/21 on the Fall 2020 blog)

The speed chess sessions were really fun. Having a timer made things more interesting and made the game more unexpected since I had to think quickly. It made me have to think of different strategies compared to regular chess. I think speed chess seemed more intense because of the pressure to make quick decisions and try to end the game before the timer ran out. Also, usually I play chess with my family, but meeting other people to play with made it more exciting because everyone has different styles and patterns of playing. In this event we played virtual chess, and it seems that could be a good activity when meeting up with friends in the future, especially for my friends that live far away.

I loved chess when I was in third grade.  I used to play during recess all the time.  After third grade though, I stopped playing chess on a regular basis and eventually stopped playing altogether.  This past year, I have started to pick up chess again and play for fun without worrying too much about strategy.  This virtual chess meet was perfect for me!  It was a lot of fun playing with a lot of people that I have never played before.  Everyone was really good, especially under the pressure of a timer.  Playing with a timer was a new experience and I almost always ran out of time because I took too long to make decisions.  I will work on thinking through my next steps faster so that next time I play with a timer, I will not run out of time!

I haven’t played chess in a long time. I actually can’t even remember the last time I played. But I do know that this was my first time playing with a timer. Boy is that stressful. You can easily lose a game by default if you run out of time on your side so quick decision making is very important. I found myself making some dumb moves or moving my piece to the wrong spot based on that stress alone. However I also found it a lot more fun. Rather than being a grindy overthinking game, it was suddenly an intense battle where quick thinking was incredibly important and things moved quickly. I have to say that even though the stress level can get really high, this style of chess appeals to me far more and I can easily see myself continuing with it. It is interesting to see what appears to be a massive surging in the popularity of chess lately. I am sure part of it has to be due to the popularity of Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, but after playing today I can definitely see why it is as popular as it is in general. It has been a while since I have had that much fun in a competitive setting. Thanks to Bassel for organizing this and if there are any more chess meetups in the future you can bet that I will want to be a part of them.

Today I attended the chess meet and had a great time. I have been watching The Queen’s Gambit on Fridays with others in Rose House and I play chess a lot on my own so the meet was right up my alley. I have been playing people on my floor mostly so it was a lot of fun to play with other people. I particularly liked how if my game finished earlier than others I could spectate other matches. I normally play untimed games or ten-minute matches so the five-minute format was a pretty big change but it definitely was an equalizer across the board (pun intended).