Bad at stuff
When I invite people to play chess with me I warn them that I am bad at it, and they get the impression right off the bat that I'm messing with them in some way. But I'm not kidding, my Elo is something like 3001, which is 100 points less than where Chess.com starts you at by default, and it's not like I'm not trying to win, I am. I'm probably, possibly, slowly improving over time but I really can't do any better than this.
People are surprised, I think, because why would you play chess when you are as bad as me? Which is a good question; similar, in a way, I suppose, to wondering why you'd write a blog nobody's supposed to read.
Why do I do anything I do, really.
Chess is nice because it's an asynchronous game I can play with my brother, who lives in Arizona and works on the road, without booting up Civ VI in the middle of the workday somehow, and even though he wins every game we play I do manage to surprise him sometimes. I time out of a lot of the games I play with random people on the Internet because I genuinely am pretty busy, but each move provides a bit of a puzzle for me. I've played a ton of openings. My dad lives locally but it's nice to play against him too, since we can't go to the gym together anymore, because I am so busy. He can't seem to lose to me, either.
It doesn't make sense to me to only play chess if you are really good at it, because only a few thousand people are really good at chess, and apparently you need to start in early childhood to get that good at it. Most of the rest of us won't ever be the best at chess. Or, actually, at anything.
I'm at least as bad at cooking and baking as I am at chess. I don't want to give up on that either! I'm bad at a ton of stuff, some of it I am well aware of, some would hurt my feelings to have it pointed out. I just feel like nowadays with everything on the Internet, everything is competitive, and it's not worth doing things if you aren't going to stand out at them. I was never really about that, but at this point in my life I'm not even a little bit about that. I opt out. I don't care anymore.
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This post was last edited 3 weeks, 4 days ago.
The Elo system is the statistical scoring system used to rank chess players by skill. Beginners are usually 400-800, GMs are like 2500+.↩