Introduction

Here I am and starting a blog now....like so many other people who perhaps have too much time on their hands!!! :-)
Probably best to introduce myself first:
My name is Mike Richardt and I live in the UK with my wife.I am 32 years old when I start this blog. I am currently a student and I would say I don't live a typical student life. Well, first of all I am married which makes living the typical student life a little bit awkward!!

I used to play quite a lot of sport but since I had a ruptured ACL in my knee playing football my main hobby is playing chess and I play for three different clubs at the moment: I play for Taunton and Tiverton in the southwest of England and I also play for Svgg Plettenberg in Germany. You can find my current ECF rating here, my FIDE rating here and my DWZ rating here.
I learnt to play chess when I was 6 years old but didn't join a club untill I was 15. Maybe a little bit too late to get really good at playing chess. I started playing in my local club in Plettenberg.
My first training session was very strange as I must have been the oldest player at the youth training. There were about 15 youngsters, of which two were girls. Girls playing chess is nearly unheard of, so I was very surprised to see them.
The other very strange thing was that we didn't start playing chess with all the pieces on the board.
In my first training session I learned how to play an endgame properly. In my humble opinion I thought that is a weird way to start playing chess. In the following weeks we learned more and more about endgames and eventually we moved on to middle game strategies. I wondered who those coaches were in the following weeks I found out that two of them were actually FM's. As good as the training was both coaches never taught us any opening theory. I had to choose my own opening and had to learn all the plans behind the openings myself with occasional help of some strong players in the club.

I think for an intro for my blog that should be enough to start with. What I will do in this blog is to publish some of my own games (if I can manage that), give some tournaments reports I will play or have played recently and put up a tournament list of tournaments in the southwest/ close to the southwest.

Also my life is not only about chess so sometimes some non-chess related blogs will appear!!!

Last but not least for my first entry: I have to apologiese for my terrible english sometimes as english is only my second language!!! So bear with me, but be honest if I have written something which doesn't make sense!!! :-)