Here is an interesting pawn formation that came up in a game I played yesterday: <img src=http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=1245081>
I knew a guy that played chess via postcards back in the day. He said there were many very good players that were in prisons!! It must be about the collaboration and the time in that case. Maybe if you played online but had some collaborators on your end you would learn from the team effort? The best games I ever played were against a computerized chess board. A friend and I were collaborating at one point, we had just kicked the level up a notch because we won. I recall the board made a move and we both thought it was stupid. We took the bait and within 4 moves we knew it was over for us!! We got a laugh out of that.
I play in one or two chess tournaments every year here in Australia when I have nothing else to do on weekends. However you encounter a particularly wierd species :- "THE CHESS GEEK" ...will turn you off the game.
Playing chess for a living is much more harder and stressful than trading for a living and competition is harder than any other sport And i know little something about that because i am FIDE master
The key to taking chess to the next level is mastering strengths and weaknesses in the board and opening and learning how to play around them. If you really want to have an eye opening experience with chess, look up books by Jeffrey Siliman or something like that called "Analyze your Chess" Basically learning what are the strong squares and weak squares, the difference between a strong bishop/knight and weak bishop/knight and other nuances is how you get better and learn to truly see the board and make more intelligent moves. Thumb through one of the books at the bookstore and you realize how little you know about positional chess. I have 3 of the books and was studying them when I had mre time. My heads was spinning at all the things I never saw or considered and still have trouble seeing or exploiting on the board.
I'd much rather swipe the peices off the board, and declare "I won !! Iwon!!! What, you didn't see the check-mate?!?"
I really like this site, it has a large database of historical games and puzzles. http://www.chessgames.com/ I remember reading about Bobby Fisher, how he would wake up at 5AM and study past chess games for two hours before going to school at age 11. Ofcourse he became a grandmaster at age 16.
I found that it was necessary to do "practise", as opposed to just play real games. Also, review your games intensely for errors, possible improvements etc. If you look at other fields, it is directed training, coaching, and practise which creates great skill. A champion boxer may only fight for 20 hours during the entire course of his career. The other 20,000+ hours are spent in the gym training and exercising. Top players might spend months, 14 hours a day preparing for a world championship match, that only lasts 100 hours of playing time. IMO, most people who get "stuck" spend much more time playing than training. The second factor is that it becomes harder to learn as you get older. Most people who became very skilled, saw most of their improvement at a young age. It's rare to see someone who was grade 2000 at age 30, suddenly improve and become a grandmaster by 35 or 40. It's like learning a language, much easier to do when you are growing up.