Chess in my life

Family

I got acquainted with chess at a young age. I was 5 or 6 years old when I saw my father playing chess with my grandfather. I asked them to teach me, and my grandfather did so.

He liked to play with me, we played huge amount of games.

He almost never let me win on purpose, he thought that there is no place for fake wins. 

I used to cry a lot because of that, but now I agree that facing real troubles is the best way to learn.

When I grew up a little bit, he stopped to play with me, and only many years later I understood that he was just not a good player, and he strongly dislike losing a game. So when I was mastering the game better than him, he lost interest playing me.

However, he was my the best teacher me, I wouldn't say he was "unbeatable" but it was hard to beat him. And it was exactly what I needed.

I am very grateful to him for all those games. He was patient, he explained me the things again and again, and he bought and read me some books about chess.

My father was a better player, and so I rarely played against him at that time. Only when my grandfather started to have excuses not to play with me we started to play. 

We don't do that regularly, perhaps 3-4 times per month, and for long period I have almost no ability to develop my chess skills.

School

At the age of 12 I changed schools, and I was lucky enough to become a member of a school class which had about 8 good chess players. 

We played a lot after our classes. We managed tournaments, and were passionate about chess.

It lasted for approximately two years before we opened a "bughouse" game for ourselves.

Bughouse is a variation of chess, a team game. After we ran into the "bughouse", we fell in love with it, and never played ordinary chess anymore

Bughouse chess ended up playing a huge role in my future life, I made friends, I acquired skills, I even got my job because of it.  I'm going to write a blog about it sometime. 

Children

Now I'm not developing my chess skill anymore. I play rarely on freechess.org, I have rating around 1700 for long time. (2700+ champion of the world, 800 beginner).

Now my opponents are my sons. 

I started to play with the older one when he was only 2 years old. 

I play with him regularly, and I let him win from time to time.

I've tried to replicate the methods I used to learn chess.

I can't see any progress, but what's even worse is that I don't see very much interest.

I am ready to give up as a chess teacher.

That's why on the last week we both went to the local chess school. 

I read in the news about a local event - a chess tournament - held at the chess school, and I wanted to show it to my son.

It was a good solution, first of all I could talk with the best teachers of our city, because many of them were judges during this event.

The second good thing that the boy was impressed by number of people who play.
He was curious about rules, table of results, and so on.

The thing which surprised him a lot when a slender little five-years-old girl defeated big adult man.

He can't believe that, he asked me how it's possible, and I could see how new this thought for him.

Luckily, in my city we have plenty of good coaches, and some of them works only with young children. 

We made an arrangement with coach for my boy. We will see soon what he gets from it.

Our chess school is very good, for instance their student Volodar Murzin who is only nine years old already plays for Russia and he is in top 10 chess players of his age.

That's why it's better for my son be trained by them instead of me.