My Online Chess Addiction Cost Me Everything

I had to check myself before I wrecked myself

Image by klimkin from Pixabay

Last week, I fulfilled a modest ambition — reaching a rating of 1500 in online bullet chess in a little under a year.

But at what cost? My humanity.

OK, that’s dramatic. But I closed my account on Chess.com, and I think it was for the best.

Online chess taught me a lot of things about myself — mostly that I’m an asshole, a hypocrite, and have the attention span of a hummingbird on crack. The only thing I became a Grandmaster in was procrastination.

Here’s a brief history of my descent into madness.

I Blame Quora

I started playing chess back before The Queen’s Gambit made it cool.

I had little interest and had only played a handful of games as a kid, but I had interacted with a few chess enthusiasts (including a childhood friend of Magnus Carlsen) so Quora kept pushing chess content my way.

I figured I could do with an intellectually stimulating hobby, so I made an account on Chess.com. After watching a couple of YouTube videos on strategy, I was ready for the big leagues.

Around the time I started, COVID became ‘a thing’ and suddenly I was stuck inside all…