Introduction
Chess, the game where royalty—with the exception of princes and princesses–and fealty enter into the most dramatic warfare, do mental and psychological damage, all the while confined within 64 squares.
To be fair, I suck at chess. For someone who had his first taste of the game as early as 10 years old from an old LG tv, I should be soaring at 2000 + rating. But I’ll tell you the reason I’m still grinding my way through 1300 rating at the end of this story. First let’s take a look at my Lichess.org profile.
I stopped playing
Consider the blue line thingy (clearer view below), you will see that It’s a record of how my blitz ratings have changed over some period in what is called a time series.
Actually, I thought I was terrible at chess! According to this lichess analysis, I fall midway between the first quartile and the median of the number of all blitz players. To be specific, I am better than 38%.
This gives me a rough idea about improvement, but I feel I will have to manually track how steep that improvement is going to be and that sounds like a challenge.
…and I began to analyze
There is so much information about myself in chess that I can look at from this simple profile page and be fascinated. My thinking is, if I can get insight about individual games/ clusters of games that I have played, then I could learn what moves are better to play than the trash I normally play.
I could easily use that information to make better decisions about how I play chess in the future. If so, I will start with those game I lost terribly. Fortunately, the Lichess analyzer can do just that and more:
The analyzer gives me charts, and tables, and list of moves, and names of Grandmasters, etc., just by clicking on “Analysis Board” and selecting what I want to see. Hey, there’s even a button that says, “Learn from your mistakes.”
In short, I see where Data Science and Analytics, is a superpower that allows anybody to get insight and make decisions based on the analysis of data collected in the past and present.
By the way, my name on Lichess is doba21, you may follow me there and I will crush you (that’s if you are 1300-ish).
Fun fact
The reason I seem to “excel” in Data Analytics (DA) even though it is very new to me as compared to chess which I discovered almost a decade and half ago:
- I have mentors in data science and analytics as opposed to having none in chess when I was young
- DA is actually a field I have become passionate about working and doing research in; I play chess casually as a brain teaser
- I can earn a decent living pursuing a career in DSA; you must be a top tier chess player to compete for cash prizes in tournaments
- I practice and watch a lot of DA videos (thanks to Chandoo Excel tutorial); I almost never solve puzzles, and I seldom watch chess games
