Discovering my hiddent talent in chess.

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I started playing chess 10 years back in high school at a time when there was no other sport I could play. Football, basketball, volleyball were all very competitive for me to make even the class teams. Few students took up chess so I saw it as a chance to easily prevail without doing much. I learnt the basics within 2 weeks and started dominating my colleagues who had started playing chess much earlier than me. There were no much competitions at that moment as chess was just growing in the country and my school wasn't sponsoring students for the few events which were going on around the country.

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I played my first competitive game 4 years later when I joined University. Uganda Christian University where I was studying from took most sports seriously with chess inclusive and sponsored the team which I was part of. The team that was there before I joined was in bad shape, consistently featuring in the 3 bottom teams in the past 4 years.

My first experience in the league was tough. My opponents took advantage of my lack of calculations in the middle game to finish me off early. I lost the first 4 games in the early 20minutes of the games. But I didn't take it so bad as I would realise my overwhelming weaknesses after each game. Shortly after, I started reading more books on openings to stop my games from ending early which did work. I would then last more than an hour of active playing before losing. This amused me and I started working on my middle game as well. And after a short while I was winning games against my opponents in the league.

I continued learning more and playing more non competitive games with players who were better than me, improving my chess tremendously and winning more games for my team in the league. That season, the team which was known to feature at the bottom of the table finished in the middle. Taking 8th place out of the 16 teams. The team participated in University tournaments as well which occurred once every year. Bagging silver or bronze in every outing.

As I grew older, more responsibilities started coming into my life requiring me to focus on different jobs to raise for bills. To this day, I don't do much of chess but I do participate in tournaments once in a while. And I do beat players who are highly rated than me occasionally.



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