INTRODUCTION
There's never been a better time to be a chess player.
When I was a teenager, struggling to improve my chess play, my options
for play and practice were extremely limited. Personal computers were
years in the future, and while there were a few dedicated tabletop chess
computers available on the market, they were terrifically expensive – far
out of the reach of a young teenager. I could try to content myself with
reading my small collection of chess books, but the opportunities to practice what I thought I'd learned were sparse: a weekly downtown chess
club meeting or the occasional “pickup” game against one of my friends,
none of whom were as interested in chess as I was.
Compare those times to today's chess environment. A chess player can
easily find a challenging game any time of the day or night on a wide array of Internet chess servers. Chess information and instruction is easily available online from a variety of web sites. Players can freely download and read classic chess books first published a century ago, books
which are now in the public domain. And chess playing computer programs allow a chess student to practice and hone his skills virtually anywhere, anytime.
If I'd had these tools and opportunities when I was a teenager, I'd be a
much stronger player today.
In fact, many people are of the opinion that chess computer software availability and Internet access are precisely why so many young people are
becoming chess masters and grandmasters at earlier ages. I remember a
time not very long ago when a seventeen year old grandmaster was considered a “prodigy”. These days it's more like, “What took you so long?”
It's an exciting time to be a chess player, regardless of your age. Chess
isn't just the province of the young; in fact, playing chess is a great hobby for people of any age. Studies have shown that playing chess helps
stave off the effects of aging on the human brain, including delaying the
onset of Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and other ailments which can
afflict older people. It's never too late to learn chess, and a great aspect
of the game is that you never stop learning – there's always a new skill,
idea, opening, or technique for you to master and add to your personal
chess arsenal.
When it comes to chess you never stop learning, but many new players
have the opposite problem: they don't know how to get started. There
exists a bewildering array of chess software choices, all promising to aid
the new player (while many of these programs aren't at all suitable for a
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