Chess

I've mentioned before that for a period of a few months I played a lot of chess with a friend, (mainly using chess.com).

Today I revisited the website and due to not having played in a long time, I got a returners bonus of free premium for a week. Their goal of gifting premium obviously being to regain players and maybe even convince them to purchase premium.

One of the advantages of premium that I like the most, is having unlimited puzzle attempts. Chess puzzles are basically all about picking the best moves for a certain position. On chess.com, there's also a rating system for puzzles. Without premium, you only get around 5 attempts a day, which basically makes it really hard to improve your rank.

Today I played a few puzzles and stopped at 34 solved in a row and went up from a rating of 1291 to 1670.

Even if I solved everything perfectly, this kind of improvement in elo rating would still take at least a week. (Every mistake usually costs more points than a correct solve)

It seems like I'll playing a lot of chess over the next few days. Chess is a really fun game and I'd highly recommend it to anyone.