I have been and I guess will always be an avid player and fan of chess. I have played chess since I can remember. Perhaps before I turned 5 as I had memories of learning the moves before I was in school. I was not a child prodigy but more of a casual player who learned to play from maybe the best player we had in the family, my cousin Edgar. Manong Edgar, as I fondly call him (he was 14 years older than me) was actually a cousin of the country's first chess Grandmaster, Eugenio Torre. And both he and his elder brother, Manong Joam were strong players of the game. When I started playing the game then, I also discovered that a couple of uncles and some cousins from my mother's side of the family played very well. One uncle was a strong player having played a lot while on board ships (he was a seasoned seaman). Papa Luis played chess whenever he could as there were few pastimes or hobbies in the 1980s when they didn't have smart phones and computers to spend time on.
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| My favorite book on chess is one where I discovered the old masters of the game. This book not only contained annotated games of the like of Capablanca, Alekhine, Morphy and Botvinnik. It also contained short stories with chess as the central topic or in the background. |
"The Queen's Gambit" was a welcome series to me that I found to be most interesting as well as refreshing to watch. We had thought it could be formulaic and turn to be somewhat of a spy thriller because it involved the former Soviet Union and its chess playing machinery. I learned from the credits that one of the consultants for the limited series was former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Chess in the old Soviet Union is depicted accurately here, and I was not surprised at the ending (sorry won't spoil it here) of the series.
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