Wednesday, March 16, 2005
How I got here, the short version
I started playing chess seriously a year or so before the Fischer boom. I got my first rating, 1419, in scholastic tournaments run by Bill Goichberg. He was a local New York City organizer back then. I made Expert when I was 20, at the 1980 Pan American Collegiate Team tournament in Altanta. My rating bounced around 2100 for several years, until I finally started seriously analysing my own games at the end of 1986. I got my National Master title seven months later.
After I turned 30 in 1990 with my rating still stuck in the low 2200s, I stopped playing for a decade. Finally, I started again by playing email correspondence games. Then, it seemed a shame to have a tounament like the New York Masters nearby and not play in it, so I came back to over-the-board tournaments in 2003. My rating has only dropped a hundred points since then, and I'm even hoping to build it back up. How I'm going to do that, I'll write about later. So there I am.
