Chess summary for January

Introduction

Back in November I saw a video posted on Reddit. It was a video of an analysis of a chess game. This got me motivated to try playing chess and I really liked it. I also like numbers, so I have decided that I want to sum up each month of chess from now on.

Unfortunately January has been a exam month, so the number of chess games are sort of scarce. But I felt chess was a welcome distraction when I wanted a little breathing room from all the reading.

The Numbers

I made a little script to sort out the data from one big file of pgn annotation since chesscube will not let me download pgn files other than manually. From this I could deduce some statistics.

I made a fancy chart with the help of www.chartgo.com.

I played 46 games in January. Luckily for my ego I won more than I lost. I won nearly the same amount of games playing white as I did playing black. A fun difference is noticeable in the games I lost: I only lost 6 games as white compared to the 12 games I lost as black. Of course only having played 46 games this doesn't seem like a big leap.

Unfortunately the game history chesscube saves only includes the rating of the players after the game. So I can make any analysis to whether players had higher or lower rating than me at the time of the game since if I had played a player near my rating and won he would probably have lower rating than me after the game. Of the 27 games I won only 3 of my opponents had a higher rating than me AFTER the game. So I think I can conclude that most of my victories were over players with a lower rating than my own.

In the end I went from 1326 to 1352 rating on chesscube. Even though I haven't really moved significantly up I feel like I have learned a lot from just playing and experiencing.

I had imagined I could have made more charts (Who doesn't love charts?), but seeing that I can't do any analysis of the ratings, it seems futile to make charts of more than just win/lose. If you have any idea what I can of further analysis with data given in a pgn file containing the rating after the game, please let me know. You can see how what kind of data is in the chesscube pgn in my January PGN chunk here.

The conclusion

I really like playing chess. I like that the game doesn't include any form of randomness that many other games like card games and backgammon have. I also feel like I am training my concentration by playing and trying to think some moves ahead while keeping my head in current situation of the game.

I would like to thank Rune Friborg for making the video who initially got me motivated to play. He also invited me to an awesome facebook group "Fucking Skak" (Fucking Chess) and then challenged me to a game and gave me an analysis of the game afterwards - this was an awesome start on my chess adventure. I'd also like to thank the awesome facebook group Fucking skak for constant motivation and chess news. The people in the group seems like good and dedicated players and this is the first facebook group I have been in which actually contributes content of very high quality!

And I cannot forget the huge impact both kingcrusher and /r/chess have had on my game. Both definitely delivers good content on a regular basis!

It's obvious I have a long way to go and A LOT more games to play before I can call myself a decent chess player. But the journey there seems fun and the goal worthwhile.