I have to be honest. I have never seen the attraction of blogs. The thought of writing personal thoughts and then posting them on the internet for everyone to read does not appeal to me. I have a strong suspicion that most of what is written is mindless drivel and musings of the self important. Recently though, I have seen several chess blogs that I’ve found interesting and I thought that I too could write about my results from the chess tournaments I have entered. I doubt many people will be interested in my mindless chess drivel but then I don’t have any illusions that it has any importance at all so I don’t care.
Chess is a hobby that I took up again last year after a long hiatus. I used to live on Prince Edward Island and play chess at the Charlottetown chess club. I even managed to become provincial chess champion but the pool of players on PEI was fairly small and the highest my rating got was in the 1900’s. I stopped playing chess in 1993 or 1994 and didn’t play another game until a year ago aside from playing against my kids. They had seen my old chess set sitting in the closet and wanted to play the game with the funny little pieces. I was surprised that my wife also knew how to play and so we taught the kids the basic moves and occasionally played a few games.
Then by chance there happened to be a children’s chess tournament in our town with players from Alberta and Saskatchewan. I entered my kids just for the experience. The following year I entered them again in the same tournament and then several others in Edmonton. They had improved dramatically and at one tournament my daughter’s success was like a spark to me. She was in a six player sectional and had won her first 4 games, then like an old pro offered a draw to her opponent in the last round to win her first gold medal by a half point. It was an exciting result and rekindled in me the desire to challenge myself and see if I still could achieve a modest level of success at chess. Plus I had just given up playing rec hockey and this could fulfill that need for competition, so with that in mind I packed my suitcase one weekend and went of to Edmonton fir the 2007 Northern Alberta Open.
Sol'n to problem: Qxc6 allows mate with the Knight
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