First Entry

I.
First entry, yay! It is a subdomain to gilachess.com. Thanks to Andrew for giving me this space to write personal notes which i hope can help me to improve myself as well as to have fun studying! And mind you, studying regularly in a correct way is one step to chess mastery.

It is my great delight and pleasure to read articles written by GM Spragget at his homepage. I actually printed it out and read it again and again. Although at some point i didn’t agree with him, i love what he wrote there. Among the suggestion on how to improve one’s self is to keep a notebook, where you write down an organised list of what you study for tracking purposes. Hence, this blog! I guess, it is more than that. it is more than purely games and variations. I will include whatever i find suitable in my way for self improvement.

And, yeah, i still regard myself as a street player who still learn how to play decently!

II.
I learnt the moves when i was 9 years old. It was not until i was 12 years old that i knew there is chess notation to record a game, and there are theories that can be studied. It came coincidently though. My dad bought Berita Harian daily and i discovered chess column written by Sabar Hashim. The year was 1990. I still remember how i searched back my chess set high and low to replay the game just published in the column!

I cut and collected the columns and played the published games , if any, again and again between weeks. In those days, at least happened to me, games are hard to get. There is only a small number of chess books in my school library and they are mostly for beginner. So, I felt very dissapointed if a week went by without any game in the column. Later i discovered Ismail Ahmad and Quah Seng Sun wrote for Utusan Malaysia and The Star respectively. ( I would like to extend my thanks to Mr Quah for his wonderful column because, apart from great writing, he also published more games compared to others! And, sorry to hear the column is no more there to give the same impact to others as it gave to me.)

Anyway, now is different. With the Internet easily become available at every home, people can download latest games. In fact, they can be watched live! With millions of games in my database, the appreciation of games by me has been deteriorating. If last time, i would write every moves of limited number of games carefully to my notebook, now i just download weekly TWIC database and consolidate them into a big one so easier for me to search certain games by player or opening or even position!

Yeah, time has change. And now, i can even write some chessic entries (read:crap!) for people throughout the World to read.

Yes, in this blog! Haha!