And being prompted by my brother to play chess online I accept the offer and promptly lose 3 games. Simultaneously.
Which rather wounds my pride, although to be fair I haven't particularly been paying attention.
But it annoys me to the extent that I begin working on my game.
Now, my game, it's a combination of mistakes, blunders, errors, all of them, taken together and shaken up, and if ever I've won a game it's been a result of hard searching for a less worthy opponent.
Time to change that. I've got to up my ante.
So I play quick games vs the computer, my lightening quick moves showing me error after error...and there are a lot of errors.
Games, it would seem, are the long way around to learning this. I mean, it takes 10 minutes a game only to realize Blunder one, two, three in that I'm going to lose, and this is not boosting my ego. But it does explain the losses.
So I'm onto a different learning tack - that of the Chess Puzzles.
And this has vastly improved my game (not to good, just better).
I'll explain it like this. IN a game you're invested in the narrative, you're building up a defense, offensive strategy, and it frequently blinds you to what's going on everywhere else on the board. Whereas the puzzles, you don't have any investment, you simply have to see the board for what it is, and make the best move.
That is not always apparent, and there's been a couple of the puzzles where I would probably contest the will of the judges, but my contesting this is a little like ... well, I know there are many better players, and so maybe I'll just solve the puzzles as best I can and hope that the "reasons" or logic becomes clear to me as I go on.
I do enough puzzles, back to the games with my brother. Now, 6 games in a row I've won, a very slight effort at sharpening my skills has vastly improved the outcomes.
Only he's stopped asking me to play chess...
Probably he's working on his skills...