One of my favorite recent games that I have gotten back into is the game of chess.

Chess is an art, well, a skillful art. 64 squares, unlimited possibilities, billions of permutations, one outcome: win, loss, draw. What’s not to love? Queen’s Gambit really got the excitement back in chess. I grew up playing, not competitively nor on a team, but would leisurely play against anyone who would play me. I knew maybe four moves into one opening, and how to fork here and there, but honestly, I knew nothing about the game of chess until 2021.

Chess is always something I wanted to get back into, but what got me back into chess was a friend, Brandon. A bit of a backstory on me, I moved to Detroit in October 2020, after my stint in Mexico. Moving to a new town in the midst of a pandemic is never easy, but I met this guy through my roommates, who I knew pretty well. Brandon and I became friends, and within a month he expressed interest to me in wanting to get into chess. Within our first month of meeting we played a game, and well, he actually beat me. Someone who barely knew the game beat me. Needless to say, my competetive drive was re-lit. I have a quiet fire, where if I lose I will make myself better in that way, and then try to rechallenge, because I enjoy fun competition. Looking back on that day, Brandon beating me was truly the best thing to happen. Brandon found a love for chess and winning. I had a competitive fire re-kindled.

It’s March 2021 and Brandon and I start our competitive itch. We go to chess.com and start to create our accounts and fire up game after game to get our ratings. When all is said and done, ass kicking after ass kicking, we get our overall rankings: myself at 800 ELO and Brandon at 700 ELO. ELO is a ranking system that calculates skill based around zero-sum statistics. The data science nerd in me could talk about this for hours. It can be applied to many, many head to head scenarios, I’ve even had friends try to apply it to professional sports for data analytical purposes. Its a cool process with cool distributions, BUT, basically tells you how good you are at something relative to a crowd. The higher ELO you are, the better you are. You beat someone, you gain ELO. You beat someone with a higher ELO than you, you gain a lot more ELO. Same situation with being defeated and losing ELO.

The grind to compete and improve against and with one another started, and here began our chess journey, March 6th 2021.