I want to take a moment to write about how beautiful is to keep playing chess even if you are not a professional chess player.
I have never tried to become a professional chess player, even when I had lots of spare time to play chess and I was relatively strong for a boy of my age. Compared to the rest of Italy, Sicily has always lacked a vibrant chess environment. Finding a chess teacher was difficult and playing national and international competitions was difficult (my father drove me twice to Northern Italy to play the Italian championship - which is a 2-day car trip from Sicily!). Fifteen years later little is changed. Tournaments are few and the top players are FIDE masters like myself (I am #3 among the active players in Sicily on Dec 2019).
Fortunately for me, I had other passions, among which nature ended up to be the focus of my career. When you work you often can back home tired and finding time for something difficult as chess requires sacrifices. Here I want to tell you that these sacrifices are worthy. Funnily enough, I reached my best rating (2333, #50 in Italy) now, in Dec 2019. This happened because even during my PhD, I decided to study chess even if I had almost no time to play tournaments. I played during weekends, or whenever I had a break between the end of a contract and the start of a new one (researcher life!).
Mine was steady progress characterised by a long period of stasis and sudden increases. Like Elderedge and Gould’s punctuated equilibrium to make a nice comparison!
At the end of my PhD, I played in Benasque (Spain) and arrived 10th in one of the strongest tournaments in Europe (24 Grandmasters, 25 International Masters, 43 FIDE Masters, 4 Woman Grandmasters, 7 Woman International Masters, and 9 Woman FIDE Masters were participating). I got my FIDE Master title and my first norm of International Master there. And in the morning before each game, I went trekking and photographing butterflies.
Notice that I was not even titled back then!
After that summer, I haven’t played for more than one year; long enough to be considered (for once again) an inactive player by the international chess federation (FIDE). Even during my postdoc in Israel, I kept working on my chess book (now completed), helped the local chess club to win their category in the Israeli league, and taught chess to my bee-keeper friend Rony Shalman. And little else.
No official games played between Oct 2018-Dec 2019...
I started playing again in Malta in Nov 2019. I ended 8th ex-equo with the 3rd classified, and 1st of the Italians (won 5 games and drew 4, with no losses). This is also why I stress that you should study endgames and train your positional understanding and your tactical eye before working on your openings. Openings are easily forgotten after one year of inactivity, but knowledge and understanding of principles stay.
In this tournament, I also won against my first Grandmaster! To be fair, my position was lost, but my opponent missed a neat tactical motif (you should never give up, everybody makes mistakes!). Winning a lost game if your opponent makes a mistake is not being unfair. I missed to convert the advantage in the other 4 games and ended with a draw in all of them! Chess should teach you to take your responsibility, and also learn to create the occasion to win and enjoying your successes.
I wish you great games!
Cherniaev-Ferrante, Malta 2019. The last move was Be4? Black wins. Can you see how?
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