Before: While I lived in Bangkok I invested 3 hours per day into chess. I had memorized over 4,000 chess problems. As I played games and saw new combinations, I would add them to my list of problems. Every month I would add 100 new problems to that total, spending about 30 minutes per day organizing and memorizing the new problems, and another 30 minutes per day reviewing my old problems. In addition to this, I played about 6 ten minute games per day, which averaged about one hour per day of playing time. My third hour per day was spent looking over the games I had just played. I did not review every single game, and I rarely reviewed an entire game. One major point of emphasis in my reviews was to look at any opening that gave me questions. I didn't memorize the openings, I would just examine them and then move on, that was the end of it.

Maintaining this daily three hour routine, in December of 2023, I reached my highest rating on "chess.com" of 2115. Just six months later I moved back to Utah, and that changed everything. Chess was no longer the priority that it was previously. I was excited to be in the outdoors and to take my camera hiking with me every night. I played only 2 or 3 chess games per day and spent no time at all studying.  With this lack of committment my rating dropped 200, and perhaps even 300 points. Then one day I started doing a new puzzle before every game, not a puzzle that I had committed to memory, but one I had never seen before. This did several things for me. 1) As I mentioned on a previous page, the more speed chess I played, the more  I developed bad habits, especially jumping to conclusions and making quick assumptions. Looking at a puzzle before a game slowed me down and got me looking around the entire board. 2) It got my brain warmed up and focused. 3) Once you have memorized 4,000 problems you pretty much have seen every concept there is (although not every position.) Since I wasn't reviewing those problems anymore, looking at a new problem was at least a way of reminding myself of the concepts involved.

I started winning, and not only winning, but winning in streaks of multiple games at a time. I played so well that I set another all time personal rating record of 2116.  To some of you one point may seem like a miniscule improvement, but I am 2 1/2 years older now and that much further away from my prime chess years (most professionals play their best chess in their 30's.) And get this, I am only spending one hour per day on chess instead of 3 hours per day.

Now I will tell you why I believe, even though I am in my 70's, I am playing the best chess of my life. I believe that devoting three hours a day to chess gave me a good base. I am not sure that I could play the way I do now if I didn't have that base. In fact, it has been over two years now since I have reviewed my 4,000 problems, and as I continue to ignore them, my grip on them will fade more and more. But I also believe that my brain is too old to continue spending three hours per day concentrating without becoming fatigued. I currently spend about one hour per day on chess, but what I lack in study I believe I am compensated for with improved mental alertness.

Twenty years ago I played an addictive amount of five minute chess. If I won, I got a surge of dopamine in my brain, which gave me a high and made me want to play another game. On the other hand, if I lost I got stubborn. I didn't want to quit on a losing note, I always wanted to get that loss back and get those rating points back. So regardless of whether I won or lost, I always wanted to play one more game. After all it would only take 5 minutes to play one more game, so why not? This attitude would sometimes lead me, five minutes at a time, to play all night long, not going to bed until after sun came up. Fortunately, this addiction comes with its own cure, its own self correction. Occasionally I could play all night and still play well, but most of the time I became fatigued and my rating would drop a few hundred points. Once I stepped back and realized how poorly I was playing, once I lost multiple games in succession, the dopamine was finally replaced with a feeling of futility and the realization that I just wasted an entire night's worth of sleep. Since then I have found that the best cure for this addiction is to play longer games, so I transitioned into playing 15 minute games. It's a lot easier to quit because you realize that one more game might be a 30 minute committment, and if it's one o'clock in the morning, that seems like a pretty big chunk of time.

My friend talks about how everybody at his clubs wants to play 10 minute games now. I think "chess.com" is largely responsible for this trend. They don't, for example, have a button that you can just click on that puts you in the 15 minute pool. You can customize your search and set it up for 15 minutes, but not many players do that, so you will have a much smaller pool to draw from, and it will take you longer to get a game. They do have a button for the incremental 15 minutes plus 10 seconds, but a game like that could conceivably go for an hour, and I rarely want to commit that much time. On the other hand, if you click on their 10 minute button you usually have an opponent instantly.  That's why, once I started playing on "chess.com" I started playing 10 minute exclusively.

Twenty years ago I could play all night long. Since then, not only have I matured in my attitude toward chess, but physically I don't believe I am any longer capable of playing all night.  To the contrary, now that I am older I find that it refreshes my brain, even in the middle of the afternoon, to get up and walk away from the computer after a game, do something else, and get my mind completely off of chess for at least an hour.

 So if you are wondering how I can play my best chess in my Golden Years, all of the things I have written above have contributed. Although hiking and nature photography have distracted me from my previous time committment to chess, I believe that the shorter time committment per day has compensated me with higher mental alertness. I also believe that the exercise and sunshine that I get on my hikes has greatly added to my mental alertness. If you are getting older and you are concerned about maintaining your focus there are hundreds of things you can do to improve your brain function. Diet and exercise are leading factors in preventing diseases like Alzheimer's. Recent research has found that playing ping pong will increase your focus by 80%, so I am currently looking for a table and a partner that I can play ping pong with! Perhaps that will push my chess rating even higher!