#play chess

[capriddle]

One of my favorite headcanons involves chess: for every piece stolen, the loser must remove an item of clothing. Naturally, Bellatrix ends up naked in less than half an hour.

[roman-ai]

[fi-mendez]

[unbecoming-kiley]

Echo Hill Forge, Steel Chess Set

[sarastories]

To all chess lover and haters!

Lately, I was thinking about the hobby that has been following me the longest in my life. It’s definitely chess. My father explained to me to play, has played against me and has never let me win by purpose. Finally, it came that day when I managed to beat him. Sounds a bit like the Queen’s Gambit, just I’m not as successful as Beth Harmon😀. By the way, I watched that serial for two years and it is amazing. I have to admit that the story made me think about why I love chess.

I played local tournaments during elementary school, but I never studied moves and learned from books. I am intuitive player but off course if you want to be really good at it, you have to work hard and analyze a lot. To be honest, I usually did not win gold, often bronze and sometimes silver on that local tournaments.

Once I was discouraged at my very beginning of playing when my father took me to a neighbor's house to play against the neighbor. He beat me and made fun of me. It might just seemed to me at that moment that he laughed at me and I was just little girl. It hurt. After that I have made a break with playing chess. During high school, it wasn't especially „cool" if you play chess. Usually in the puberty the young people have other stuff on their mind. But during my studies I was asked to play at some events for the faculty team because there was always a lack of a woman playing chess. Then I moved abroad and there it is, for me a new discovery, online chess. Since than I play online chess at www.chess.com under the username Raca87 and later thanks to my husband I found the great chess club. My profile picture on chess.com that I have from the beginning is interesting to many players I played with. People, that is not me on the picture😃! I found a picture of a girl sitting on the toilet with a laptop on her knee and catching wifi quite by accident. It is a picture of a famous Croatian singer and I find it quite symbolic. I see in it a girl who spends every free minute playing chess. That's me!

Let me go back to the original question and that is why I love playing chess.

- I love it because it was with me in the most difficult moments. When I moved abroad for the job, I had almost no one around. It wasn’t easy to listen as my new co-workers talked about their great plans for the weekend without remembering to invite me to some get-together. So I though who cares and usually spent my weekends at home cooking and playing online chess on my phone.

- When I'm traveling in the bus, plane or train I can play against computer offline. Now I find it even more interesting to play against bots. There is something cool about that. e.g. I was really pleased when I won the bot of the great Alexandra Botez who has a 2100 rating on chess.com.

- When you play a chess game well, you automatically get a dose of respect from the audience. It feels good! For chess you need incredible mental strength to focus and often to stay concentrated for several hours. When you menage that and win, you can be damn proud on yourself.

- It relaxes me! When I want to divert my thoughts from daily life, I play chess games quickly, which is not good for rating. Then I'm hasty and I make banal mistakes, but it's great for relaxing the brain😀. Also my chess statistics simply show my mental state😀. If I am concentrated I progress fine and the points grow slowly. When my head is absent, points go down the road. e.g. How did I manage to go from almost 1700 points to 1400? The drop in concentration began with my pregnancy and continued with the gain of children. I often have to interrupt games or hurry up because one of the babies starts to cry.

- About this point I am not sure if I like it or not. That is adrenaline that I feel in my stomach during the long games on tournaments. I have to fight every time against it to stay relaxed and concentrated because only than I am able to win.

I realized pretty in the late age that it is extremely intriguing for men when a woman plays chess. With my husband, I often watch great chess player and entertainer Big greek on youtube. My husband likes me playing chess. When I was younger, I thought other consider me boring because hey, I like to play chess. However, nowadays online chess became very popular. Nevertheless, any long term hobby we choose is important as it full-fills our lives in a special way.

[mynameismarykelly]

[itsjaxmatsuo]

man you can hate on the royal heir 3 all you want but you can’t deny PB went off with these designs

[lesravageurs]

Ravageurs play chess. | Eric Roberts by Tony Duran