Sports
I am a big sports-lover, and I have had the chance to practice a dozen different sports including soccer (team captain), swimming (since age 6, and competing soon thereafter), sailing (2-year instruction with my school), running, table tennis, free-diving and even some surf recently. Right now I am a Rower at Carnegie Mellon's Rowing Team; we train at 5:30am 6 days a week (Saturdays usually a bit later than that), and our workouts combine rowing practice with weight lifting and various types of cardio (High Intensity Interval Training mostly, but also Steady State) including our typical Cathedrals workout (going up 6000+ steps in 1 hour) on Fridays. Last official 2k test (split): 1:57.2 - April 02, 2.5 months of training. Goal: sub-7 (around 1:42 split). Music There's a type of music for every occasion, with some personal favorites in parenthesis:
Chess "Chess is everything: art, science and sport" - Anatoly Karpov, 12th World Champion. I started learning to move the pieces (well, sort of) around age 5 or 6, and started playing chess in the summer of 1998 (age 8), in the afternoons, after a day at the beach in my summer house. A few years later I stopped playing, and it was not until the summer of 2013 (age 23) that I got back in touch with chess. Although I play chess as a hobby and never had any formal instruction, I'm very passionate about this great game: my (probably too ambitious) goal in chess is to one day become National Master (NM). However, for the moment I'm not even a FIDE chess player, but an occasional Club player. Besides playing (against man or machine), I enjoy spending some time everyday solving chess problems in a couple of famous chess websites, since it is a fun way to challenge one's brain in many different ways (logical thinking, pattern recognition, spatial visualization, calculation, creativity). Lately, I've been exploring blindfold chess (mental chess) since I believe it is an extraordinary exercise to improve calculation and general math ability; in that direction, I've developed a system to know whether a given square of the chessboard is white or black: from basic math we know that +*+ or -*- = +, and +*- or -*+ = - and so if we set White=-, Black=+, even=+, odd=- and use numbers instead of letters to denote the files (columns), you can easily find out the color of any of the 64 squares without looking at the chessboard. Ex: a3=1*3=odd*odd=-*-=+=Black. My all-time favorite chess players are, in order:
Personal bests - Standard tactics rating: 1708.3 (better than 77.85% of active chess players). FIDE estimated rating based on tactics: 1715 - Blitz tactics rating: 1764 (no info on distribution available). As Blitz tactics penalize for solving time, it is estimated that Standard tactics rating = Blitz + c, where c is in the interval (100, 200). So, rather optimistically, my best Standard tactics rating so far is around 1900. * Goal: to reach a rating of 2000 in Standard tactics (expert chess player). Reading · Currently reading: "Why stock markets crash", by D. Sornette. · Last book I read: "The Boys in the Boat", by D. J. Brown. · Next book I plan on reading: "Letters to a German princess", by L. Euler. |
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