Chess is a recreational and competitive board game played between two players. And during the start of this year, I came across few content creators who stream chess on twitch and I found chess very interesting and engaging to watch so after that I decided to start playing chess on a website called chess.com, which is a very popular website among chess players and millions of people play chess on that every day.
I started to play chess on chess.com from January 16th, 2021. I started with the rating of 985(the rating given by chess.com at the start doesn’t reflect actually how good you are it’s just a baseless rating) and dropped to 770 (actual rating as it is reflecting my play). Since then I played chess regularly for 2 months to improve and increase my rating of chess.com, it 963 at this moment.
Learning outcomes achieved: 1,2,3,4
LO1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
As I started playing chess on a regular basis I identified my strength and weaknesses. My weakness was the openings of chess as I didn’t play a proper line while opening and it was costing me games so after I knew I watched videos on youtube and learned some openings which improved my game by a great margin. Another weakness that I identified was that I went low on time on many games so I started playing blitz chess(short time games) which increased my speed of decision making. It was important for me to know these weaknesses as without that I couldn’t have improved myself and would have made the same mistakes in the future.
LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
During my experience I found learning new openings a bit challenging, it was challenging for me because I had to remember the openings and the correct order which was time taking and difficult to do. This was the first time for me learning and remembering something in chess which made it a bit more challenging, players who have been doing this for a long time would find this comparatively less challenging than me. I overcame this challenge by playing the openings against the computer again and again which helped me remember it, and if something went wrong it wouldn’t affect my rating as I am playing against a computer. After overcoming this challenge I feel confident about the way I play and about my style of playing. It is important for you to undertake new challenges in order to improve yourself and learn from that challenge. During the experience, I also learned different chess tactics which too helps me increase my confidence in my games.
LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
I had to dedicate some of my time to chess regularly, so I made a daily schedule that included 30-40 mins chess at 9:30 at night. Usually, I am not a very organized person but I had to organize myself here. Initiation was difficult compared to planning as some days I failed to play chess as I had other work from school. Self-organization skills really helped me when I wanted to organize my work and create a schedule.
LO4: Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
It was difficult for me to overcome after losing several games in a row, here perseverance was needed which helped me continue playing even after tough results. After showing perseverance and achieving my goal it made me feel happier about myself and the work I had done. The commitment which was required was playing chess regularly in order to improve me. Here being persistent was comparatively more difficult than being committed to playing chess as I really liked playing chess and had no issues in playing it regularly but after losing several times continuously it was difficult for me to continue on that and persistence was needed. Showing persistence here helped me not give up on my goal
To conclude, during my experience I developed the learner profiles reflective, knowledgeable, thinker. As I had to reflect upon my games and moves after each game, I had to gain knowledge about different openings and tactics to improve and had to also think of smart moves to win games. The highlight of the experience was learning checkmate patterns, those are the most fun thing to learn, these patterns help you beat your opponents. I succeeded in my experience as I really improved at chess and my rating increased significantly, and this made me feel very glad as I had worked hard for it. Also finally reaching the 900 ratings made me really glad as I was stuck around 850 for a long time. Also from the experience, I learned a lot of chess skills which helped me improve and I also learned about not giving up after failures. The learning from my experience will help me in future chess games and the moral concept of not giving can help me in my day-to-day life.
