Playing to Win The Journey of A Young Chess Player

I first came up with the idea of writing a book about my chess experiences when I directing a local USCF scholastic chess tournament. As young kids and their parents went in and out the front door, I couldn’t help but remember myself at their age. Even back then, chess was an important part of my life as I attended tournaments, played games and socialized with friends. Then I thought: wouldn’t it be nice to formally document my own chess experiences? And thus this book was made.

Many top chess players write instructional books on strategy or publish autobiographies of their illustrious chess lives. As I am only an amateur player, I do not intend for this book to be either an autobiography or an instructional work. Instead, Playing to Win was written as a recollection of my experiences (with some advice and lessons offered along the way). Along with anecdotes of various events, I have a collection of carefully analyzed games starting from 2005. Each game is recorded using standard algebraic chess notation and annotated with conventional chess symbols.

This book is divided into chapters based on chess rating. In chess, USCF (United States Chess Federation) ratings are official, measured indications of how strong a player is. My highest peak USCF rating was 1882, which put me in the 92 overall (including adults) percentile and 97.6 junior percentile. However, because I have played hundreds of recorded tournament chess games over this period – each that takes time to be played through and filled with annotations, which, considering my other pursuits, would definitely take me over a few years to completely document– the first version of this book will only contain games in the 1200-1300 rated period of my chess life. Later I fully plan to take account of the rest of my matches – including stories about specific chess clubs, directing tournaments, and coaching students – as others chapters in this book.

Writing this book has been a meaningful project for me. When planning the book, I had to go through my previous notebooks to retrieve practice problems, chess lesson handouts, and old archived games. This process brought back childhood tournament memories, like beating a tough opponent and winning my first trophy. It also provided me an avenue of self-expression unique from those of social media or personal journals.

I have learned a lot about myself from doing this research and documenting my experiences, but I also hope you will be able to draw some personalized chess advice from my annotations as well.

Thank you and happy reading!