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I played a bit of chess in junior high and high school, though there wasn't a chess club. Reading Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess was one of my first real exposures to tactics and was a great introductory book, without all of that daunting notation stuff. I also got some instruction at the beginning of high school (centered mostly around King pawn openings). After graduating from high school I played only occasionally, that is until 20 years later when one of my sons, Keith, began playing chess when he was about nine years old.

About the time Keith was learning how to play chess, I decided to resurrect the chess club at Radford University, when I was a faculty member there. Keith would come to the meetings too and was soon playing quite well. He continued to play chess with his friends when they got together at the library (he home schools). After about a year, we learned about the nearly monthly scholastic chess tournaments that were held close by in Roanoke, VA. [For a small city, Roanoke has a fantastic scholastic chess program. It's certainly a model that I would love to see reproduced here in Columbus, GA.] The tournaments were on Saturday's and lasted from 10am to about 5pm. After one day of hanging around all day waiting for him to finish his games, I noticed that the open section allowed adult non-students to play. I joined the US Chess Federation and signed up for the next month's tournament. Keith and I got hooked up with some other families who were strong players, we began studying together from books and he and I have been hooked on chess ever since. Unfortunately, neither Keith or I have been able to play in a tournament since moving to Columbus in August of 2005, however we have continued playing and hope to start making it to tournaments in Atlanta soon.

I've tried several different openings, but have been focusing most of my efforts on the King's Indian Attack for white, and on the Pirc for black, though Keith has recently convinced me to switch to the Sicilian Dragon for black. We're rated within 50 points of one another, with my current rating about 1200. I do better with longer games, as I often find myself under to much time pressure for short games. Most of my games are time control 45 minutes, but I much prefer 90 minutes as a minimum.

We've purchased a number of books along the way, but the two that we've found most helpful have been:

• Winning Chess Tactics, by Yasser Seirawan
• Winning Chess Strategies, by Yasser Seirawan

As a result of our improved play using these books we also plan to get other two books in the series:

• Winning Chess Openings, by Yasser Seirawan
• Winning Chess Endings, by Yasser Seirawan

Both Keith and I have really enjoyed Seirawan's style of presentation, which makes it easy and fun to learn. I would also highly recommend joining the Chess Games site. Their Opening Explorer is an online collection of games, including graphical browsing and win/loss/draw statistics, that provides a wonderful way to investigate potential opening scenarios.