My current chess journey was launched, as were a great many others, by Netflix’ airing of The Queen’s Gambit in October 2020 (based on Walter Tevis’ great novel of the same name). That this drama became available during the lockdown phase of a global pandemic helped us to not merely binge the drama but to try to live it afterward by taking up chess for the first time ever, or for the first time since a brief introduction to the game in childhood.
I’ve kept a personal journal for more than four decades, so it wasn’t much of a leap for me to start one about my chess learning. Unfortunately, I didn’t log the initial phase with much regularity or in any detail: the first entry appears three months after I watched The Queen’s Gambit, when I began–too soon, I know now–looking at books about openings. I also did other strangely random things, like memorizing the moves of the Opera Game, which I have since forgotten. I think that memorizing that and other games or sequences can be helpful, but the benefits of that activity were entirely lost on me at that early stage. The next significant development in chess journey was, again, inspired by a popular media depiction of the game, but a less well-known one.