I just recently posted something about Andrew Tate on Twitter. I don’t know much about him, but when I had read he played chess when young and his dad was an international player, I dug in, and found his dad was a LEGIT international master. This is the title below grandmaster. By all accounts, he should have been a GM given his peak rating. That being said, chess is regaining some popularity again, and with this – I wanted to post about the why – and encourage many of you who enjoy the game to read about how you can involved.

My background to setup the piece

My background here – I’m not a GM (grandmaster). I peaked at like 15 years old when I played in the World Open in 1991 and went 5-2-1. I still have the games written on my tablet if anyone wants the receipts. Electronic records didn’t start until the end of 1991, and I believe it has my first tournament registered as the National Chess Congress as I had just turned 16 and was working a lot. Now, the World OPEN is not an invitational. So, don’t think I got a super secret invite there. It was 1 hour from my house in PA in Philly, and the year prior I had been an 8th grader who went 8-0 on the high school team which helped us win counties, where we then played in the state championship in Bloomsburg. I had a choice presented to me by our chess coach. Play in the junior high section, where I might do ok, or play in the HS section. I was very, very intimidated. I chose the junior high and went 4-1 and placed 8th in the state under 9th grade. Yes, I have those receipts too. My teammates begged me to play with them and I was very unsure of myself, and thought I’d be smoked. I was terribly, terribly wrong. My team got 3rd in the states for HS and had I played, we possibly would have won the state championship. To this day, it’s one of those things that bothers me daily. I moved schools after the states, and lost touch with the guys. My new school didn’t have a chess team, and there was no internet, so that was that. Just now did I find out that I could have continued to play in the HS tournaments – at the time I thought the team had to be invited. These are lessons learned to help my 14 year old son now.

Chess popularity

I was born in 1975, and 3 years prior, Bobby Fischer became the world’s first US chess champion. In this country, it was a craze. My dad learned to play, and when I was 3-4 he started teaching me. By the time I was 7, I was legit beating him without looking at the board. He had given me chess books, and given that I have a rather obsessive compulsive disorder – I was able to sit for 8 hours straight and play out these games on our dining room table when older. I played with my dad hours every day. The board I played with him – I still have, and play with my 14 year old on it.

But Fischer’s rise to fame ignited a generation of chess players. As the cold war was hitting its peak, you had players like Karpov and Kasparov gaining international fame as soviets. As children, we learned how important chess was to their culture, and it was my form of olympics to compete against the soviets. When I played in the World Open, there were 1500 players there. There’s the OPEN section, that ANYONE can play in, but you will get crushed by grandmasters. Then they had sections for under 2000, under 1800, etc etc so you play against competition closer to you. I had gone 5-2-1 against the U1600 group if I recall correctly. The record is correct, I just don’t know if it was the U1600 or under 1800. I had met Roman Dzindzichashvili in the elevator. At the time, “Chess Life” was a magazine for all United States Chess Federation members, and I could not believe I was in the elevator with him!!! For my international readers – it turns out he was Ukranian, but at the time there were former soviet players here a lot. While I wanted to beat them in chess, I respected and appreciated their talent for the game. I tended to study their games a ton, and you can see clear differences between the 1960s style of chess and the 1990s differences. The best I can describe it is that the 1960s chess was like a simple 8 cylinder engine in a classic car. Simple in design. Strong. Foundational. In the 1990s – you see the Russians playing more extended types – and the best I can describe it is like the engine with the circuit boards and diagnostics now – overly complicated to get that last 1% of efficiency.

More recently, a chess miniseries called “The Queen’s Gambit” came out and people like me saw it and it brought back a LOT of memories. My last “real” tournament may have been 1992-1993 or so. I made a “comeback” in 2009 where I went 4-1 and beat some lower rated players and lost to my junior high nemesis Peter Minear who is like a 2300. I barely got out of some of those games against 1000-1100 players. Playing fast and loose. These were “game in 30” or so and most of my games were much, much longer.

The flashbacks I had with the Queen’s Gambit I then started to want to teach my oldest, again, and he didn’t take to it. That is, not until Dec 2022. In Oct 2022, I went to my brother’s wedding in Vegas alone, and to stay out of trouble, I bought a chess.com subscription to solve puzzles. I had a knack for them. But my son’s friends started playing it in school. He told me how he was doing, and I gave him a few lessons and had him try the puzzles. His progress in 6 months is astonishing. I just took him to a local club play for youths, and he went 5-1, playing the best student there twice and going 1-1. So as he has been progressing, I have had the itch to get back into it. I have played a lot more recently on chess.com. Feel free to find me at natefishpa there.

With this, I have been watching a TON of youtube videos lately on it. I love chess analysis as well. One of the sites I visited a lot was gotham chess. As it so happened, YouTube had this video in my feed with Levy on talking about how chess has become popular again.

So yesterday I watched this video, and he nailed it perfectly. Guys like me who played in our teens, away from the game for 30 years, watched the Queen’s Gambit and play with our kids. Our kids then want to play and get better and thus more interest locally.

As it so happens, the school next to my son’s just won the NATIONALS for High School. I want to put an asterisk there. Not to take anything away from them, but they sent like 20 kids. If it’s a team points-based system, it might just be cumulative team points. That means that perhaps a team of 30 would have beat the team of 20. In reality, it should perhaps be the team points of your top 4-8 players or so. In my chess league in Berks County, there were 8 “boards”. So it would make sense for something like that. You can enter 50 players, but only your top 8 players count towards team points.

How to get involved

I’d recommend everyone go to USChess.org. This is the home of the US Chess Federation, and they have all kinds of stuff relating to tournaments, rules, gear, and even local clubs. Given my extended absence from the sport, I had a pretty decent rating at 15 at 1650ish, and do not want to come back into the game playing 1650s and get killed. So I’m playing a TON now on chess.com, where I would encourage a lot of you to go. That site has continued to get exponentially better over the years and now has a game analysis tool I use after every game.

There are essentially two ways to play in real life. Rated or unrated games. Rated games tend to be for tournaments or where money is involved. A rating is a system that tracks your ability against other players. In my 2 years in HS chess, I went 4-4 as a 7th grader when we got 2nd in the county, and I then went 8-0 when we won counties. But these were unrated games, so I had no idea how good I even was against the rest of the HS players in the state. Given what I know now, and how ratings were then and now, I’d argue that as a 9th grader I was one of the top 20-30 players in the state in HS, with a possible trajectory of 2000-2100 by the time I graduated HS. My rating has NEVER GONE DOWN. Meaning, I was on a strong upward trajectory and beating players of my same strength routinely. Today, none of that means a hill of beans.

Ratings inflated and chess.com ratings

There is an inflationary pressure with ratings over time. Those who aren’t great drop off, and those who are decent pad their ratings by beating those not so great. I could make a legit argument that a 1650 from 1992 could be perhaps a 1750-1900 today. On top of that, I had no resources. No internet. No one to play against that gave me a challenge after I moved high schools. My dad was my best friend, but he hadn’t been competitive to my abilities since I was perhaps 9.

I’m bringing this up because I could do the below. I could lose a small tournament or two to get my rating at 1599. I could enter a tournament for $10,000 in the Under 1600 section and perhaps win $10k. It’s called “sandbagging” and someone like me today who may have abilities that could max at 1900-2100 in 1-2 years should prepare as much as possible to play over the board.

On chess.com, you get ratings as well, but they tend to be higher than in real life. My current 1600 or so there tells me I might be playing at a 1500 rating there. I’m cool with that. With 30 years out of the game, I need to connect the neurons again. I find the time limit games of 10 minutes (called rapid) I am not great at with the timer. Many of my losses are time issues. Several I just blundered pieces away. Other games I’m trying new systems and it completely backfires and I get my ass handed to me. Love it. Why? Because this is the place you WANT to make mistakes.

When you play in more formal tournaments, you may have much longer time limits. This is my wheelhouse. Many don’t have the patience for this, and this is where I will calculate you to death 5 moves out. So if you play on chess.com and find problems with the 10 minute time limit, don’t get frustrated. I moved now to 15/10 games where it’s 15 minutes and 10 second increments per move. You cannot do this with an “analog” chess clock and found my performance to be far, far, stronger than the 10 min games. That being said, with 2 children and a career, it’s hard to find the time to play longer games.

So – play chess.com at 5-10 min games for VOLUME. They are quick snippets. Try to learn something from each game.

Also – don’t put a ton of stock in a chess.com rating. I believe there’s rampant cheating there. I am there to try out things with a system I’m working on. So if I play a 1400 and he is playing like a 2200, I simply enjoy the challenge. It also teaches you not to underestimate skills based on ratings, as someone can play out of their mind too. I have heard of kids that have an 1800 or so chess.com rating but USCF ratings have them at 1250. Yeah, no. Kids might do this to impress their friends, but as an adult, I simply don’t give a shit about a chess.com rating. I need to prepare for WAR “over the board” or IRL (In Real Life)

Tournaments/clubs

You can find club meetings in your area through uschess.org. I even found a club in my area I’m about to connect to, so I can play a bunch of “over the board” games in person to try and see where I might be today. I’d like to play at a consistent 1800-1850 rating or so prior to going back into tournaments. I’d estimate when I stopped playing I was on my way to 1800-1900.

With something called “quads” you play in groups of 4. So perhaps there’s 40 people. There would be 10 quads for that day and you play against others of like skill. Unrated players would play in the lower sections, where you might see 500-800 or so ratings. While these players have skill – they all want to be a grandmaster someday, so don’t blunder your pieces against them!!

With many tournaments, it’s a swiss system. Take a look at how this works with a tourn I won. This is the chester county scholastics I won at 15 right before I turned 16. I was in 10th grade here, and my chess teammate from above was Josh Anderson below.

How a swiss works is they pair up players for round 1. If you win, you are paired with another winner. And so on, until everyone played their games. Here, it was 5. I got 5 wins. You can see in the first round I beat 11, then beat 6, then 3, then 2, then 4. For my performance, I got a “norm” for a 3. This system is rather confusing, but when you get so many “norms” you are that “title” of a player. I was perhaps on my way to some good things, but my parents divorced at 16 and I ended up working every weekend of HS. With lack of players to consistently play, I drifted away. I spent a ton of time with trumpet, baseball, and tennis.

Elements of the game

In chess, there is an opening, middle game, and end game. It’s more like phases from one to the next. In phase one, you are setting up your pieces to attack the other – and the other is defending against attacks. This is called the opening. You learn items here like how to move pieces, pawn structures (and minority attacks), tempo (time), space, how to value pieces in any position, etc.

With the “middle game” it’s sort of like when the attacks start. The bloodbath begins. Here’s where a strategy is executed using tactics like forks, checks, forced moves, open files/ranks/diagonals, batteries, pins, and most advanced – piece sacrifices. Many beginners understand the value of a rook is 5, the pawn a 1, the queen at 9, and a knight/bishop at 3. However, the objective of the game is not points collection, but checkmate. A more advanced player might be able to understanding that you can grade a rook for a pawn – IF it leads to checkmate. An even MORE advanced player (1800s might not get this) might be able to look at the board and estimate that your white bishop might be worth 3.5, your black bishop 2.5 – and an enemy knight on an outpost at 4. If you exchange your 2.5 point bishop for a 4 knight, you have equaled the position where your opponent’s valuable piece placement had given him an advantage. This is all speculative and estimated. Likewise, some pawns may be worth more than a point to you based on their location and importance in protection or having an outpost.

The last phase is the end game, and this is more or less when a lot of your pieces are off the board after exchanges. Magnus Carlsen was the world champ for a long time – and arguably the best player ever – mostly because of his endgame theory. If you watch a lot of his games, he will steer people away from book stuff that he calls “boring” to play dynamic lines to then get to an endgame where he wins. Think of him like the Royce Gracie of MMA. All of these boxers and kickboxers were lethal, but once the fight got to the ground, Gracie would tap everyone out.

The endgame is something many of us struggle with. I can hold my own here, but this is also the most “boring” part for many of us to learn. Some kids are savants with this. I was someone I remember as enjoying daring tactical play who took risks. Many times I was 1 move further ahead than my opponent, which is all it takes. They get a pawn, and think they are winning on points, when you LET them get the pawn, as they THINK they won an exchange – but all that REALLY did was gain you tempo. By the time they won the pawn, and think they were ahead, they then dug in and realized that their pieces can not rotate back to their king in time and it’s lights out for them. THIS is why I played chess. It was the DEEEEEEP thinking, the setup, the execution – and then watching the look on their faces when they realize they are had.

As a competitive player then, I was pretty deep on maybe 10-12 openings, perhaps 4-5 variations for some. This helped me get strong structures to start, and my tactics would take over, as I’d understand like “with the Dutch, I want to own e4” as my strategy. Today, as an adult, I cannot study openings like I did. And now with Youtube there’s traps and tricks everywhere that kids are learning. It’s constantly updating theory, tricks, and gambits. Can I even be competitive today? Yes…

When I was 34, I had just had my first son, and my buddy from above was running a Friday night tournament and asked me to play. With 3 weeks to prepare, and barely looking at a chess board in 15 years, I devised a system – I’d only play a handful of openings. I ordered some books, studied up, and was able to make my way to 4-1. But my sloppy play in those wins told me I wasn’t ready for a comeback. Yet.

What to do?

You like to play. Perhaps your kid likes to play. Today, there’s so many “travel baseball” teams that unless your kid is 6’3″ and plays 100 games a year in travel baseball, he’s not getting a baseball scholarship. However, if your kid gets good grades and is one of the top chess players in their state, they might get into Ivy league schools, and may even get financial assistance. My buddy above had received a scholarship for chess for college. I’m not saying that’s common today, but if your kid isn’t going to be the 3rd basement for the Yankees, it’s possible he gets a PhD in biology from UPenn via scholarship for undergrad.

So – what CONCRETE steps can you take?

  1. get familiar with USchess.org and look at clubs tournaments in the area. You want to get out and about to meet people and play.
  2. go to chess.com and set up an account and start with free daily puzzles. Play others online for free. HAVE FUN.
  3. Learn the basics of a few openings. Learn tactics like I mentioned above. This gets you the biggest bang for your buck early on.
  4. Get to a club and play people. Many love to teach basics, and you can learn a lot, quickly.
  5. After you seem to be doing ok against some of the lower end club players, enter a Quad. This will get you play against lower rated players and get you a rating.
  6. Once you have played 20 games, you have a “rating”. You can play in much bigger tournaments as an unrated or provisional player, but now is a good time to try some of the bigger tournaments.
  7. (edited to add) On YouTube, you can now get TONS of free video content on openings, analysis, etc. This is something that 30 years ago didn’t exist except for on DVDs of professional productions grandmasters put out.

The more you play, the better you get. The more stronger the players you are playing, the better you will get. It may take you 1-2 years to get to a quad, but you can make it there. If you play a LOT in 6 months, and tend to have a brain in your head, you can get there.

Lastly – you can make some family vacations around it. When I was 16, I did a chess camp at Bently College outside of Boston, where they had Bobby Seltzer playing with us. I’d go there during the days, and my family went to see the Cheers bar and other touristy things. I never saw Boston lol. When I played in the World Open in Philly, my family got us a room at the Adams Mark Hotel on City Line Avenue. We ate at the TGIFridays there, which a few years later would have Allen Iverson and is crew eating at. The point is, you can get hotel rooms around these tournaments and play your kids in there with you, or put your kids in and go do some relaxation by the pool with your husband/wife. I plan on opening the doors as much as I can for my 14 year old. Who knows, 3 months from now he may be burned out and never want to play again. Or, he may want to play in the state scholastic tournament 20 mins north of my house, or the national tournament 2 hours from my house, or the world open 2 hours from my house. In any way – I want to support him.

Fun story…

When I was at the chess camp outside of Boston, one evening we were to do charter fishing. My dad and I were big time fishermen. Well, we went out on this boat pretty far. And…..well….they made a movie about it called “The Perfect Storm”.

Meaning – at the exact same time I was a few miles off shore with our charter fishing boat, was the EXACT time this crew lost their lives that they made a movie about. Everyone on the ship was throwing up, including most of the crew. I was one of the last to throw up, but I finally moved inside when the boat tipped to a point that the water was right up to where my feet were, and I felt I could have gone overboard. The rest of the customers were in the middle of the ship throwing up and huddled, and I didn’t want to be around it. It was a party for me. But, when I almost lost it, that was a wakeup call to then feel absolute terror. Up until that point, I was feeling “macho” not having thrown up. “I’m tough”. But when I almost got hurled into that water, and then looked around and saw no one, and realized no one would have seen me go over, yeah. It got real, and quickly. The captain was…..somewhat concerned in his voice, and seeing the entire crew throwing up was not reassuring. We eventually got back, and then years later heard the movie was literally the same day this happened. Yikes. So when I saw the movie, it was a lot of flashbacks to it.

Meaning, for me, let me stick to the chess camp. You do the touristy stuff 🙂