Hi there. When I heard about Steemit from a @jerrybanfield video his enthusiasm rubbed off onto me and I became pretty excited. The idea that you could get paid for using a social media platform and creating content sounded almost too good to be true.

So I had to think - what content can I contribute that might be valuable to people? I'm not a person who necessarily does something he doesn't believe in - so why not just create the content that I already am passionate about?

I am a chess player, programmer, and video game lover. My username "ZenChess" is a combination of two things that I really love - chess - a lifelong passion since I've been about 17, and Zen Buddhism, which I am a huge fan of. Don't worry - I won't be preaching about loving-kindness. I'm not actually a Zen Buddhist, I don't meditate. My main interest in Zen is in all the funny and interesting stories about the old masters during the Golden Age of zen in china, and the puzzling koans - which are highly entertaining stories that contain a kind of mind-melding riddle.

Enough about Zen - I don't plan to base my content around that much if at all. So what am I going to do here?

I plan to occasionally post some of my philosophical thoughts, maybe talk about new video games that I'm interested in, and some of my life philosophy, but my main body of work is going to be chess content. Before I talk about that content, I'll give you a little background into my interest and history in chess.

I first learned how to play chess at a fairly young age, though I probably only played a handful of games. Later, when I was a young teenager, I believe I played my step dad a couple times. I remember one time I came up with a plan for setting up my pieces by drawing this crazy diagram on a piece of paper. I got to my setup, but then my step-dad demolished me anyway. :)

When I was about 17, for some reason or another I just suddenly got interested in chess. I bought the book "Play Winning Chess" by Yasser Seirawan, which was an excellent introduction to the basic strategy and tactics of chess. I played some against a girl in high school, and I played online a bit.

I then began to ramp up my study of chess by buying more books, and driving 3 hours on friday to get to the Omaha chess club. I played in some tournaments, and did a lot of training by solving chess tactics and looking over classic games by masters like Capablanca, Fischer, Alekhine, etc.

I began playing chess for long periods of time on sites like chess.net and the Internet Chess Club. I improved fairly rapidly, getting about a 2000 rating on chess.net.

Well, I won't go into the whole story of my chess career, but eventually I played more tournaments, and my rating slowly rised over the years, and today I am rated 1979 by the United States Chess Federation. It's almost an "expert" rating (2000 or above). It's not exactly something to be proud of, but it's definitely much better than average.

Some of my accomplishments include beating 2 masters to win an over the board tournament, and online beating many international masters and even about 8 grandmasters or so in the popular 5-minute time control on the internet chess club.

So on to my content - When I study chess I try to understand the abstract concepts behind why you make a chess move. Ideas like 'maintaining the tension' in a chess position, increasing pressure, moving towards a goal, are concepts I try to look for and apply in my games. Of course, through my reading of chess books, I have learned much about the more 'normal' chess strategy such as the importance of piece development, strategical control of squares, control of the center, etc.

The thing I believe I can offer chess players who are climbing the ranks up to where I'm at is that I've been slowly improving over a number of years (I'm 37 now), so I have a very real connection to the mindset of a less than master player. I remember the things I learned that improved my game and changed my playing style for the better.

I've always loved teaching things and I feel like I am a good communicator in the right setting.

So, my first content goal on steemit is going to be to start from the beginning. I'm going to assume you already know the rules of chess, make sure you know the less-known rules like castling and en passant, and then I'm going to try to write a vast amount of material that I hope will help you eventually move up to at least 1800-1900. This means that my early content is going to be very basic, so if you are already an experienced chess player, you may want to just keep an eye on my stuff and wait until it the basics are already covered and I begin making more advanced content.

So in addition to text/image guides, I'll be making youtube videos to go along with the content. These will be videos created specifically to go along with my guides. I have already made quite a bit of chess video content in the past, although much of it is gone now since google video went down. I'm also a twitch streamer if you're interested in watching me play/commentate on my games, you may be surprised to know that there is a pretty good community of chess streamers on twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/zenchess/

So now that I've lain down the gauntlet, I have to begin the enormous task I've set myself. I hope that this can work on this site, and that there's at least some interest. I have read a lot of chess books, and what I believe will set my guides apart from them is I'm going to try to go into much more detail and volume of content, so that ideas are completely understood and every little thing is covered.

So if you're interested in chess, even if you don't know the rules, or you play chess but never actually studied standard chess theory, please follow me and I will do my best to give you the essentials you need to surpass me in the wonderful mind sport that is Chess.

Oh yeah, and I just wanted to give you my bitcoin horror story - I used to have 100 bitcoins and sold them for $30. Peace out :)

Oh, one more thing. I do plan to make some programming content too, specifically about my favorite language Smalltalk. If you're interested in learning about the original object oriented language and why it's different and cool, please follow me :)