the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

Today, I just might win a chess game with Bill, my nemesis. 

I know it's not much, but I so rarely win our games that just the promise of almost getting there makes me happy. 

Chess was an unplanned and unannounced change I made a few weeks ago. It began when I happened to see Bill studying a chessboard on his smart phone before a department meeting. A couple of days later, he mentioned that he was "getting into chess" these days. I told him that I'd tried taking it up when I was in Izmir and had been thinking of tackling it again. We commenced playing one another at chess.com. Most of the time, he makes short work of me, but I have the occasional admirable game. 

Meanwhile, I practice on the tactics trainer the site offers, and take the occasional lesson using their "chess mentor." 

It occurred to me when I first started out that if I spent nearly as much time studying chessboards and working on my tactics as I did mindlessly playing Candy Crush on Facebook, I could probably get pretty good at chess without even really trying. After all, one of the skills chess players evolve is the ability to see the chess board as patterns--not as individual pieces. About the time it occurred to me that I'd long since developed this ability with Candy Crush, I saw the possibility to develop it with chess. 

And I am. I'm still pretty terrible, but I'm not as terrible as I was a few weeks ago. That's all I'm going for. Kaizen. 

d