This might seem a little strange, but my wife Valeria’s ex-husband Zeh has become a best friend of mine. He’s here at the house at least four times a week, helping Heloisa with her homework, having dinners with us, cycling with me, and best of all, playing what we call “Team Chess”.
We play together against a random player on Chess.com under the handle “TeamHeisenberg”.
When we started earlier this year in March, Zeh was very much a beginner chess player, barely knowing how the pieces move. But he saw me playing all the time and expressed a desire to learn.
The problem with teaching someone chess is that it’s no fun if the student never wins, and it’s no challenge or fun for the instructor to just let them win. So I came up with the idea of us playing together as a team. We could discuss our moves and strategies. In the beginning it was just me explaining my plan, but soon Zeh was suggesting alternatives and catching my blunders.
This worked out great because we either both lost or both won the games, but never against each other. In fact in the ten months and 91 games we have played, we have yet to play against each other.
And we have found that together we play better than either of us alone. In other words, both of us also have separate accounts on Chess.com, but neither of us have a rating as high as TeamHeisenberg does. In fact TeamHeisenberg’s is 200 points higher!
And in eight short months Zeh has been playing, he has reached the 62.7 percentile among the millions of serious players on Chess.com.
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