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Comment by dgordon | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to hear you ran into that. It sounds like a terrible environment to try to learn chess in.

But you can get quite good without spending much time at all studying openings. I hate studying openings, and I'm definitely better than most of the people who cram openings. Learn how to play chess well -- what you wanted to do anyway -- and learn just enough of the opening to get to a playable middlegame position (playing less-aggressive openings makes this much easier, and allows you to figure it out based on general principles), and skill, not memorization, will make the difference.

(Just in case you, or anyone else reading, were thinking of taking it up again.)

P.S. I wouldn't want to play the Caro-Kann either. ;-)

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I pretty much gave up on it, the only thing I still enjoy is teaching kids to play and one guy from Amsterdam I occasionally play, we're fairly evenly matched so it's almost always interesting.

I learned to play when I was about 6 years old, my neighbour was a very good player (I believe master class, but not sure, it is very long ago), he gave me Max Euwe's books and I dutifully worked through them, we would play for days on end, and I loved it, the guy must have had amazing patience (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370499 ).

In school I was pretty much unbeatable until I met Arno Bezemer, a kid living about 4 houses down the road, he taught me a definite lesson in humility, I didn't win a single game for the first year and half and even when I did win it was usually only because he was distracted or had a really bad day, he taught me a tremendous amount about chess.

He enticed me to join the club and I lost almost all interest very shortly after that, I think I only played in that club for about 6 months, and it killed any interest I might have had in competitive chess.

Eventually Arno became the strongest player in Amsterdam, he's in the top 100 players for the Netherlands, ranks 3637 for the world.

But he's dedicated his life to it, I don't think I could do that.

http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=1001396

edit: corrected the author of the books I learned to play with.

Update, check out this kid: http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=24116068

#97 in the world, only 16 years old. That progress up the rankings chart is amazing.

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