Fast forward to me, aged 45, in August of 2020. I had built a beautiful marriage over 15 years, I had done a lot of cool things professionally, but after six months of the pandemic - having just moved across the country and knowing almost nobody - I was really struggling with loneliness and loss. It was in this context that I happened to find my way onto Twitch out of boredom, and found Gata Kamsky’s Twitch channel.

Now, I had never stopped playing online blitz chess or following chess events as a fan, so finding my way onto a chess Twitch channel was not especially surprising - especially when I was stuck inside for several months. It was a bit surprising to me how much I enjoyed it, especially Gata Kamsky’s channel in particular. Gata Kamsky is a fairly famous player, having been one of the top players in the world in the 1990s, and one of the top American players for much of the 2000s and 2010s. He is also famous for being a relatively positional player, with strong endgame skills - exactly the type of player Mr. Shorman had despised. But Kamsky had obviously been really good, and was still really good despite being one of the older players on the top 100 list. I started watching because I was curious, but I kept watching out of wonder.

Gata Kamsky knew what to do in positions that completely mystified me. What’s more, he knew what to do immediately - “This knight needs to go to d6”, “That bishop is misplaced on the queenside”, “I need to get these pawns moving somehow”. I started watching him playing the same “guess the move” game that Mr. Shorman would use with us. And, after a month or two of regular watching, something kind of amazing happened. I got better at it. Positions that were mysterious before started to make more sense, and I got better at predicting what Gata would do.

I started subscribing to Gata’s channel and playing in his simuls and events. Of particular interest were his arena events, in which all participants started the game from some theoretical position he thought we should know: the English attack against the Sicilian, the Gruenfeld, the main line Spanish, and then one that really impacted me - the Carlsbad structure arising from the Queen’s Gambit Declined Exchange Variation. For all of these, to prepare myself I was learning entirely new and unfamiliar positions (shockingly, Gata never decided to do an arena on the Elephant Gambit). In this context, I realized that chess learning tools had gotten amazingly good - advances in technology had made it far easier to learn an opening today than it had been twenty years earlier. I learned the basics for several main-line openings in this way, and found that although it was a lot of work, it was doable, even in my mid-40s.

Through all of this, I could feel myself learning, and it was intoxicating. By this time, for various reasons, I had long ago given up the idea that I would again play competitive chess at a high level. The idea that I didn’t have to be done yet lit a spark in me. I realized that I still had it in me to achieve something special. At this point in my life, I really needed that. I made a commitment to myself: I was going to really work at it, and finally get a USCF master rating.

In some sense, this goal seemed like it could be pretty easy. When I stopped playing in 2004, I had achieved a rating of 2140. All I needed to do to make master was get 60 rating points. Further, I had made 2140 with some clear areas of improvement - my openings were trash, my positional play was pretty bad and my endings were horrible. With so many clear weaknesses, there had to be some quick ways to improve my overall strength by the moderate amount that was needed.

In another sense, this goal seemed like it might actually be impossible. Neither I nor the chess world had stayed still between 2004 and 2020. I had achieved my rating largely by out-calculating people in chaotic positions, and I knew that calculation and tactical skills were exactly the things that tend to fall off as a chess player gets older. Further, the same great tools that I had noticed for learning and improvement had been helping other people too. While I had been silently declining in strength, the chess world as a whole had been getting far better. Although my rating still read 2140, my true rating in 2020 was almost certainly far lower, and I wasn’t getting any younger.

The truth ended up being somewhere in the middle, although it was closer to “impossible” than it was to “easy”. After three years of steady work, in October, 2023 I earned my National Master certificate. It turned out that the most important factor was my commitment to myself. The drive to do something special never left me, and it helped me to get through the many painful obstacles that sprung up between me and my goal.