Well I have just joined the chess community again. I have been a life-long chess player; the problem is that I play almost non-stop for two to six months at a time and then become burnt out and stop for a couple years. I was first taught how to move the pieces when I was about three. My mother was an occasional player, and played with my father sometimes, as well as with me. I mostly played with my dad though, and never beat him (until my twenties). Growing up, I played games here and there as I could find people to play with, but was never serious about it.

I've played in spurts like this most of my life, starting in my early twenties. I've gone through probably six "chess periods" since about the age of twenty-one. The first lasted a couple of years (after meeting a man in his seventies who used to play professionally, who bought me The Game of Chess, which is probably one of the best instructive books on chess ever written), but each after that has been about six months or so. During these stages, I play chess. If I'm not playing a chess game, I'm reading a chess book. If I can't read, I'm talking about it. If I can't talk about it, I'm thinking about it. My rating goes up, and after some months, I just putter out and completely close chess out of my life until a year or three later when it springs back into my life like the (lovely) disease that it is. I fully believe what Tal said in the beginning of his (in)famous book, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal (probably my favorite chess book).

So here I am, starting afresh in my newest chess phase. I'm doing the normal brushing off of rust that takes a few days or a couple weeks. Then, my rating jumps up a couple hundred points to about 1300-1400, and then plateaus. It will then usually go up another hundred points over the ensuing months.

We shall see how this phase goes, and how long it lasts! All praise Caissa!