Grumpy Old Man

Think I'm here to wax nostalgic about the Good Old Days? How things were so much better in the world of chess years ago? Hell, no! This is the golden age of chess compared to what it used to be like. Gather around, kids, and let me tell you what we had to put up with.

When I started taking chess seriously in 1991, there was no internet chess. Either you played over the board or you played against a computer program. The main problem was that it was difficult to consistently find opponents who were at an appropriate skill level. I was still at the beginner stage, and even when I found a group of other players most of them were so much better than me that they didn't want to waste their time playing against me because they beat me so easily. In the pre-internet era I don't think I ever really solved this problem.

It was hard to get tactics practice, too. There were tactics books, with hundreds of pages of puzzles, and those did help to some extent, but unless you continually accumulated more books you eventually knew all the answers. Occasionally the listed answers would be incorrect, but there was no way to easily plug the puzzle into an engine to prove it.

You could only play occasionally unless you enjoyed playing against computers. I did not; computers programmed to play at lower levels did nonsensical things like purposely losing a piece early in the game and then playing error-free until the human player blundered the material back. It was better than nothing, but it didn't feel anything like playing against another human being.

Reading chess books was one of the primary methods I used to try to get better at chess back then as there was little choice. Unfortunately I quickly discovered two things: most chess books are aimed at much stronger players; and accumulating knowledge about chess (which is mostly what books offer) doesn't really do anything to increase your skill. With my book learning I might be able to tell that in a given position White should be better because his pieces are more active and he has the two bishops, but if I had to actually play the position against a player who had no idea who was better I would lose because despite their lack of knowledge they were just better than I was. Knowledge does help some, but just as you can't become proficient at a sport like basketball or baseball by reading books about it, you can't get good at chess either if that's all you do.

Another thing that didn't exist back then was online shopping. Other than the very small selection of chess books at the bookstore, the way you found chess books was by ordering them from the USCF. Every month when you got Chess Life in the mail there would be a section offering chess books. Once a year around Christmas they'd put out a small catalog where they'd have pages and pages of books you could buy, and clocks and sets and boards and scorebooks. It's hard to explain to someone who grew up in the internet era how much fun it was to look through a chess catalog like that since nowadays you can go online and within seconds find multiple outlets selling all the same stuff.

After becoming a USCF member my first purchases were a tournament-size plastic set, vinyl board and a battery-operated chess clock. Most clocks back then were the kind with hands and a flag and they had no ability to have a delay or increment since those weren't really a thing. The fact that my clock was battery operated meant that it worked silently, unlike the wind-up clocks that ticked that were common at the time. I may not have been much of a player--I'm still not--but I had all the right gear to fake it. I still have all those things I bought back then and I still use the set and board. I'd use the clock too if I could, but now almost all tournaments have a time delay so you have to use a digital clock. It's hard to believe, but my analog clock came with a AA-size battery included and it still works, almost 30 years later. One of these days I'll probably break down and get a digital clock, but it is not this day.

I sometimes wonder if I had grown up in a later decade, and picked up chess in a time when I could have played online and done limitless tactics puzzles and watched instructional videos on Youtube if I would have become a better player. Possibly not; I didn't start playing until I was in my twenties and my OTB rating now, when I do those things, is no higher (actually it's lower) than it was then. But I suspect I would have. I'm jealous of beginners today who have so many more resources available to them than I did. All I can do is give the pathetic complaint of the Grumpy Old Man how easy these kids have it these days.