About the Old Chessnut
Chess for the serious adult learner — from someone who is one.
Who is the Old Chessnut? An English club player in his sixties, currently rated in the 1800s (ECF) who has spent the past couple of years doing something he hasn’t done since his teens: studying chess properly.
I’m keeping the pseudonym. Not for dramatic reasons — anyone who looks hard enough can probably work out who I am — but because I want to write honestly about my own games, my own mistakes, and my own unconventional opinions without my opponents reading my preparation notes, and without dragging other club players into a public forum they didn’t sign up for. The Old Chessnut is a character as much as a person. I’m comfortable with that.
The long way round
I played my first competitive chess at 13. By 15 I was playing for a club. I went through the usual junior journey — congresses, county chess, being very sure I understood openings I definitely didn’t understand — and by my early twenties I was a reasonably solid club player, sitting somewhere in the 1750–1800 range.
Then life happened. There was a ten-year gap when small children and a demanding job made serious chess impossible.
When I came back properly, I discovered something useful: the break hadn’t destroyed what I’d built. Pattern recognition is persistent. The games were still there. But I was starting my improvement journey again, older and with rather different constraints.
The career years that followed were productive professionally and disastrous for chess study. I had a senior role that consumed most of my energy, and what remained went on family. I did, however, buy chess books. Quite a lot of them. I am currently the slightly embarrassed owner of more than 650, most of which I have not studied seriously. During the cash-rich, time-poor years, buying a book was a proxy for improvement. I am not proud of this, but I suspect I am not alone.
Now
I retired a couple of years ago. I still play regularly for a club and occasionally in tournaments. I now have more time for chess than at any point since I was a junior — which is simultaneously wonderful and slightly alarming, because it means I have to actually study rather than just collect books about studying.
My rating has been as high as 1950 and as low as 1600 (though some of that range could be due to changes in the ECF rating system – and conversion factors from old to new style ECF grades) . I currently sit in the 1800s and I am genuinely trying to improve it — not to reach any particular target, but because the process of serious improvement is interesting to me in a way it wasn’t when I was younger and simply expected to get better.
As I am quite IT literate, my career was in that space, I have tended to be at the leading (or should that be bleeding!) edge of the technology curve. I’ve been using ChessBase since the late 1980s, when it ran on DOS and games arrived on floppy disk. I am currently interested in how AI is changing the study of chess and am experimenting with agentic AI tools.
What this site is
Old Chessnut is a record of what I’m learning — not a teaching site, not an authority, not a place for received wisdom. I’m writing it partly because articulating what you think forces you to actually think it, and partly because I suspect there are other people in roughly my position who might find it useful.
The content is aimed at serious adult club players, particularly older ones. The challenges facing someone trying to improve at 40, 50 or 60 are meaningfully different to those facing a talented junior. Memory works differently. Time works differently. The relationship with failure is different. I’m not aware of much writing that takes that seriously, and I intend to.
You’ll find book reviews, game analysis, notes on improvement methods, and honest accounts of what’s working and what isn’t. I’m not going to tell you how to play the Najdorf — there are grandmasters for that, and they know more than I do. What I can offer is the view from the club trenches: informed, experienced, and unsparing about its own limitations.