Engineering a chess match against my brother

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2021-06-08 09:00:06

This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the process? Not so sure. This is the story of me trying to be unconventional at probably the most studied game in existence and using my software engineering background for something that probably doesn’t need it.

Although I’m a total disaster at chess and this post is useless to whoever seriously wants to improve at their game, I still think it was worth sharing how it’s possible to apply software engineering principles to a problem. Was I successful? You’ll see at the end.

During the 2020 COVID19 pandemic, my brother, along with many other people, took a passion for playing online chess. After playing for a couple of months he started speaking very enthusiastically about it and challenging other family members, but where my father would budge (and get digitally butchered) I wouldn’t. For one thing, I refrained myself from delving into a potentially very time consuming hobby. I knew enough about chess to understand that to become even a mediocre amateur club player you’d still need to sink hundreds if not thousands of hours in the game. I admit I also didn’t like the thought of losing against my brother, which was certain at the time, since he already had hundreds of games under his belt and I had none.