I’ve always been a chess enthusiastic. But the problem was that I had no one to play with and I hate to have to play with computer. Then @e4c5 told me about chess.com where you get to play with real people. Was playing there for about two years and used to have a 1600+ rating. And then I stopped playing.
Now I’ve started playing again. And know what my rating is? 1300-1400. I sometimes lose to players with <1300 rating. Wanted to bang my head against the wall. But no.
I decided that I will be hereafter playing just for fun and not for the rating. That’s a good excuse. I don’t feel bad at losing the games anymore. Which is all that matters.
(PS. If you’re not in chess.com yet you should definitely join. It has a huge community and a lot of learning resources.)
Tag Archives: chess
Installing SCID in Ubuntu
SCID is a free, cross-platform chess database application. Can be used to edit PGN files and do loads of other stuff.
Unfortunately there is no PPA or deb files available to install the app in Ubuntu, so you have to get the tarball available at the site and install manually. If you try to configure the tarball you’ll get an error saying that it cannot find Tcl and Tk in the system, even though you have Tcl/Tk installed. The reason is you need to have the developer channels of Tcl/Tk installed for SCID.
Here’s how to install SCID in Ubuntu:
1. Install Tcl/Tk developer channels using the command:
sudo apt-get install tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev
(8.5 is the latest release)
2. Download the SCID tarball and extract in a temporary location
3. Go to the extracted location in a terminal and enter the following commands:
./configure BINDIR=/usr/local/bin
sudo make install
To run SCID, press Alt+F2, type scid and press enter.
Exams and chess
In every exam season I find something to distract myself from studies. And this time it’s chess.
I had stopped playing in chess.com for several months and the rating had dipped to about 1250. Once I restarted playing it climbed back again, but not as high as it used to be. My skills have become blunt. Will need a lot of practice to reach a rating of about 1600.
And then I bought the diamond membership in chess.com for a month. Cost me 7 dollars, but hope it would be worth the cost. I can now play unlimited moves from the mobile app, has unlimited access to tactics trainer and computer workout and several other cool features. The important thing is to make proper use of each of these features before the month runs out. If the going gets good I would perhaps buy the diamond membership for a whole year. To get access to Chess Mentor you need a platinum account but that’s not within my budget’s reach.
And talking about the exams.. well, I’d better not talk about them.