Thinking of Retiring!

  

    I have 8 games left on LSS where I have been playing for the last 5 years and am giving serious thought to retiring after these games are completed. The reason is that I am tiring of playing draw after draw with engines. I’ve put some work into preparing opening books and testing out different engines, but in long games there doesn’t appear to be much difference between Houdini, Stockfish and Critter and I’m not good enough to guide games into positions that engines don’t play well. The result is that despite my best efforts I’m only +5 there.
      I have also thought about playing on one or other of the servers I’ve played on in the past, but it seems that all sites have a whole lot more engine users than they are willing to admit, so that’s out.
      OTB tournaments are out, too. To tell the truth, for quite a few years now I’ve found myself “chessed out” after about an hour and not wanting to play anymore. There’s an informal meeting of chess players at a local coffee shop on Saturday afternoons and a couple players aren’t bad. The last guy I played was an older gentleman who was tactically very wily and it took be an hour and a half, but after avoiding a lot of his clever traps, I finally managed to nip him in a R and P ending. He said his rating back in the 1970’s was around 2000, but he doesn’t play anymore.  A couple of players were in the 1600-1700 range twenty-some years ago. I don’t visit the place much because it always seems like there’s something else to do on Saturday afternoon and you never know if a chess player is going to show up or not and I don't like sitting there all by myself drinking a $1.90 cup of coffee then driving back home. 
      Since beginning to play chess in 1959, I gave found my interest in it waxed and waned over the years, including a couple of 10-12 year periods where I did not even look at a chess set. Now my interest is waning again and I have decided it’s time to put the pieces back in the box and I am even toying with the idea that it’s time to cease blogging and do something else with my spare time. Since beginning this blog in March of 2010 after my first one got hacked, Tartajubow on Chess II has had 1037 posts and 0ver 200,000 views while my other two blogs averaged between 10,000 to 12,000 views, so all-in-all it has been pretty successful and I have had fun blogging, but maybe it’s time to quit.
      If I don’t make any more posts, thanks for visiting; if I do make more posts, disregard this post.