Go back to 2020 and this was what the Tournament Life Announcements looked like. Chess is probably the only sport that has grown during the pandemic!? Now all the Queen’s Gambit and E-Chess enthusiast are coming out to test their online skills in real tournaments.

The pages are full again with opportunities to test your disciplines. We reopened 2 December. The questions coming from people transitioning from online, or back to Over The Board chess have the same underlying theme. The Screen is for your casual eye and the board is for your slow/tournament eye. They mentioned it as fast or slow in this month’s issue of Chess Life, but I’ve been teaching the difference between the casual and tournament eye for more than 3 decades. Experience makes you good at tactics, study and analysis make you good at strategy. Study and analysis sticks better when you use a board!

Play, teach, direct, and organize is back! It takes a tournament or going to a club to make players realize how much they’d forgotten study, play, analyze, reflect and repeat!! For the prepared student, the next couple of years will be the easiest points ever gotten at a chess board!! E player weaknesses will become the articles of insight!? E-chess service providers will be selling everything you need to correct following their, instead of grandmaster advice?!

If you are ready to get to work,(go to tournaments), SCBC is poised as always to give you the training that will get you in the top 100 of your age category, with 40%- 60% less games than players that are just getting better by experience! Virginia’s own Praveen Balakrishnan, broke 2600 in 2020 and was awarded the title of grandmaster in Feb of 2022, I’m sure that he’d agree it can and should be done in less than 1960 games and 14 years!! I hope someone gives his parents a trophy. They had a 3 year period where they took him to 764 games!

Getting some help, even on a short term basis, is better than spending thousands of dollars a year trying to get good at chess from experience. Why go out and make your own mistakes when you can learn what to do from everyone else’s. Consultations are free and informative! If the student is not ready for coaching, we get them ready for free!!