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It doesn't sound egotistical. It just seems like you had good parents and you put in a lot of hard work around a difficult subject and it paid off. I wish I ha

It doesn't sound egotistical. It just seems like you had good parents and you put in a lot of hard work around a difficult subject and it paid off. I wish I had put in more time as a kid for chess and that there was more STEM materials for computing and robotics. The 90's was a wasteland between the time of the BBC Micro/Commodore era and what we now have today with the Raspberry Pi and the maker movement. Windows 95 just wasn't very good for a kid with no idea where to start. Is chess training software not a saturated market? I'm not super familiar with this to be honest.

mindgam3 7y ago
Haha, no, like most scholastic chess champions I had a super dysfunctional home environment. One parent definitely supported/pushed my chess, and I give credit there where it’s due, but I could only apply the label “good” to either of my parents with some major qualifiers. Never too late to start training! Neuroplasticity is a thing. Chess training software is super not saturated. The dominant program, ChessBase, basically hasn’t changed in 20 years. Still no Mac version or decent web version if I’m not mistaken. There’s a lot of cool things happening in live play and steaming right now with LiChess, which is phenomenal, and chess.com is starting to up its game as well. But serious training software is stuck in the 90s, hence opportunity. Not that there’s any money in chess, but that’s another topic.
- new4thaccount 7y ago
  Well I hope everything is going well for you now in life! I didn't mean to imply your past was ideal and am sorry if it came out that way. Thanks for the background on chess training programs. I had a friend with Houdini or some other engine maybe 10 years ago and it had a pretty extensive training mode or so I thought. It was fully 3D and could explain every move and suggest better ones...etc. Houdini is pretty expensive iirc (edit: just looked it up and it is ~$100 range), so maybe something more reasonable would satisfy a need? Also, I suppose the training mode was not as fully featured as real training software? I can't tell if this is the same "chessbase" thing you're talking about.

mindgam3 7y ago

Haha, no, like most scholastic chess champions I had a super dysfunctional home environment. One parent definitely supported/pushed my chess, and I give credit there where it’s due, but I could only apply the label “good” to either of my parents with some major qualifiers. Never too late to start training! Neuroplasticity is a thing. Chess training software is super not saturated. The dominant program, ChessBase, basically hasn’t changed in 20 years. Still no Mac version or decent web version if I’m not mistaken. There’s a lot of cool things happening in live play and steaming right now with LiChess, which is phenomenal, and chess.com is starting to up its game as well. But serious training software is stuck in the 90s, hence opportunity. Not that there’s any money in chess, but that’s another topic.

new4thaccount 7y ago
Well I hope everything is going well for you now in life! I didn't mean to imply your past was ideal and am sorry if it came out that way. Thanks for the background on chess training programs. I had a friend with Houdini or some other engine maybe 10 years ago and it had a pretty extensive training mode or so I thought. It was fully 3D and could explain every move and suggest better ones...etc. Houdini is pretty expensive iirc (edit: just looked it up and it is ~$100 range), so maybe something more reasonable would satisfy a need? Also, I suppose the training mode was not as fully featured as real training software? I can't tell if this is the same "chessbase" thing you're talking about.