Here are three board positions I mentioned in my previous entry, where this silly beginner (me) managed to overlook some easy checkmates in the endgame against a CPU.
All positions are black to play.
Problem 1: there’s a checkmate here, and a pretty straightforward one. Black wasn’t paying attention and captured the rook instead :(
Problem 2: Even though this game is clearly done, Black made a silly move that gave White one more turn alive. Find the mate I missed!
Problem 3: OK, even I couldn’t miss this one. There are at least two mate-in-1 options here. I took the one that involved a capture. Can you see the other one?
Being a beginner sure is hard work, especially when I make it harder on myself by straight-up overlooking the end of the game twice!
Thursday (day “minus four”): My best friend found himself in a hospital burn unit after a cooking accident. With temporarily immobilized hands and feet from skin grafts, and his immediate family out of state with other commitments, he wasn’t going to be able to do much on his own. I came by to stay at least through Sunday morning, in order to help him with food, drink, lip balm, and just generally keep him company.
While the burns had been healing somewhat well, he had just had his skin graft performed when I came in. He was in immense pain, reporting that his thighs (the skin donor area) hurt worse than the actual burn sites. They kept him under heavy painkillers and he faded in and out of both sleep and lucidity. While he appreciated the company when he was able to talk, he spent more time out of it than in. I realized quickly that I would definitely want to find something to focus on during the times when I wasn’t needed, because I planned to be there for a while.
Now I had played chess on-and-off before. I had the chess.com app on my phone to mess with casually, and even was briefly on my middle school chess team a couple decades ago. But, I had never taken it even slightly “seriously” and still considered myself an absolute beginner. I had checked “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess” out from libraries a couple times in my twenties and was loosely familiar with things like forks, pins, and checkmating a king when he was all by himself on the back row, but never learned to apply any of it, so really, my level of play was always “probably beat someone who just learned the rules, and literally nobody else.”
What had brought me back around to chess was an ad I saw in an idle game I was playing for an app called “Magnus Trainer”, which seemed to be a chess training app released with the blessing of a notable player (who I would soon find out is the current World #1 and World Champion, Magnus Carlsen from Norway). I went looking for it in the app store, found two programs with this guy on it: the “Trainer” I was looking for, and also a cute program called “Play with Magnus” that offered simulations of the Champion at various stages of his life. I installed both, because it sounded a lot of fun to play against the 5-year-old version of a future world champ.
I poked around both of the Magnus apps and the chess.com app for a little bit, and then watched some TV with my friend. The cable selection was extremely basic (no FX, no Cartoon Network, only ESPN for sports channels), so we found ourselves watching lighthearted programming that was easy to watch back-to-back, like TruTV’s prank show “Impractical Jokers” and the CW’s stage magic showcases “Masters of Illusion” and “Penn And Teller: Fool Us”. The nurses were reticent to give him heavier painkiller doses, because of the risk of respiration difficulties, but he was eventually able to get off to an uneasy sleep, and I found myself drifting off in the recliner.
Yowza, I’m starting to notice I’m using a ton of brand names on this. I promise I’m not being endorsed by anyone to make a stupid blog about being a 30something chess newbie, or to trick anyone into watching dumb TV shows or downloading free-to-play apps.
Day -3 (Friday): Friend was in a lot of pain still, but his respiration rates had stabilized, and they were able to give him some of those unspellable medications they have. I found myself with a lot of free time between the moments he was able to get up, and decided to really crack into the lessons on the Magnus Trainer app. It started off with super-basic lessons that amounted to drills practicing the pieces’ moves and captures, and gradually increased in difficulty so slowly I hadn’t yet noticed it was happening. Some of the “games” in the lessons seemed especially bizarre - there was one where you were moving around trying to escape from a “monster” piece which slowly floated around in real time. The challenge would increase when it would as you to pick up “keys” on certain squares as you fled, and then to play as pieces that are increasingly difficult to get to those particular squares, such as knights.
I was having a good time and felt more confident, so I tried playing the Play With Magnus game. Happily I discovered that the biographies for the first few difficulty levels (Ages 5, 5 1/2, 6, and 6 1/2) indicated that they all took place before he developed a particular interest in playing chess, and mostly talked about his hobbies at the time (soccer, geography trivia, and books about pirates). I tried a few games against ages 5 and 5 1/2 and found that he would often make completely erratic moves, failing to capture in obvious exchanges or just leaving pieces completely en prise (fancypants chess talk for “just sitting there so you can straight up snatch em up). A few wins boosted my confidence further, and I went back into the Trainer app, completing all of the sessions marked Basic and Easy, and making some headway into Medium.
Day -2 (Saturday): At this point I had started to grow a little obsessed with this Trainer app. I was sometimes failing tasks, especially on the ones where speed was an issue, and I got determined to keep on plugging through, and at the very least finish all of the Medium sessions before I left the hospital burn ward on Monday.
Couldn’t sleep at all, except brief nods-off in the recliner that peaked at maybe one hour. When my friend was asleep, I’d put my headphones in, pop on a podcast (listened to a lot of McElroy family shows in this time, especially Sawbones, My Brother My Brother And Me, Wonderful!, and the backlog of the discontinued Coolgames Inc.), and blast straight into the chess tactics and games. I found myself beating the ages 6 and 6.5 versions of Play With Magnus (plays somewhat similarly to ages 5 and 5.5, but doesn’t as often decide to just randomly give up the queen or miss an obvious capture). I was intimidated by the description of age 7, where young Carlsen was motivated by sibling rivalry to defeat his older sister at the game, so I started playing games against the CPU of the chess.com app, which even offered an estimate of the CPU’s Elo level (the score used most commonly to rate a chess player’s overall performance. a number in the 3-digits is a true beginner; an Elo rating of 2000 in the USCF is considered an Expert, and a professional International Master player holds a FIDE score of no less than 2400). As that parenthetical aside probably tells you, I ended up doing some research as to what the ranks and rating numbers mean, and what I could expect to know at each stage. As I played the chess.com app, I noticed that Level 1 (Elo 200) seemed to play full nonsense moves most of the time, and Level 3 (Elo 500) seemed to be the level where it first started really punishing any super obvious blunders I made. Unfortunately I found myself moving too quickly and leaving valuable pieces en prise, so I ended up going back to tactics in the Trainer.
My goal was to finish all of the Medium lessons by Monday. I finished them by the end of Saturday and was starting to crack into the last set, the “Hard” ones. Sleeplessness is a Thing, y’all.
Day -1 (Sunday): Doesn’t matter how many tactics lessons you do, you lose against easy mode CPUs if you leave your queen en prise. Stop leaving your queen en prise. Stop leaving your queen en prise. Stop leaving your queen en prise. Stop leaving your queen en prise. Stop leaving your queen en prise. Stop leaving your queen en prise. Stop leaving your queen en prise. Stop leaving your queen en prise. Stop leaving your queen en prise. All losses and no mates make Jack a dull boy
Day 0 (Monday / yesterday): Left hospital at 6 PM, confident my friend was once again in good hands. The next day he was to have his graft sites looked at, and should have regained some of his ability to do things (I will update this tomorrow with his condition). He was acting like his normal self, and even suggested that the experience might have given him the experiences he needed to go back into standup comedy, which made me happy to hear. It was what he had wanted to do a decade ago, but politics at some of the local comedy clubs ended up leaving him with a distaste for the scene, and he had quit. I hope he follows up on that, he’s legitimately a funny and talented guy.
Still starting to make some headway into the Hard section of the Trainer app. Moved exclusively to playing Play With Magnus on the 7- and 7.5-year-old levels, as level 8 is officially where it jumps to “intermediate” and suggests that the boy had started to put in some serious study, which seems well beyond my point. Still found myself making reflexive moves without thinking, and moving pieces that were critical to defending other ones. Currently, my record against this app is 28 wins, 7 ties, and 16 losses, and it rather generously estimates my level of play at 892.
During a game against the Level 3 (Elo 500) chess.com app CPU, I managed to get the game down to a mate-in-1 situation 3 times in the endgame without even noticing. I will make a separate post about that one, it’s wicked silly.
Day 1: done made me a blog, yeehoo!
I’m trying to figure out what a realistic goal is, if I keep on practicing fairly consistently, where I can try to reach in a month and in a year. I’m in my early 30s, which is probably way too old to start taking a game seriously and expect to become the best ever, but I do wonder if I can ever make it out of “beginner” and into, I suppose, “chess player” status.
