I have no offical rating -- I've never played in a tournament (nor even seen one in person). My schedule never permitted it, and I suspect I lack the patience for tourney time controls.

I learned the moves almost 30 years ago, from books. My favorite was Cozen's "The Kinghunt in Chess", which I haven't seen since. I was hooked on the beauty of chess -- I knew Immortal, Evergreen, Rubinstein's, Fischer's GotC, etc. I didn't know how to actually *play*, though.

I played with friends in middle school, and had no clue. Later, I briefly (like, twice each :) attended the chess clubs at Caltech, U.Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), and U.Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but they both preferred flat 5 minutes, and I can't think that fast -- I need the 3 seconds.

In late 2006, I started solving chessgames.com's Puzzle of the Day. After a few months of that, my play on pogo has gotten somewhat more vicious, and much more fun. I look for piece sacs that I never would have considered before. My opponents have declined about 80% of them -- even the unsound ones ^_^

I prefer Ruy/Spanish as White or Black. As Black, I trust my QGD against 1.d4, but I dabble in KID, QID, or Nimzo-Indian -- usually whichever one I saw most recently on chessgames.com at super-GM level :) I used to lose to King's Gambit more than any other opening by White, until I got mad, Googled it, printed out the first 3 hits, and did some homework. Since then, my KGA is about +350=10-20 as Black.

I like watching soccer and volleyball. I prefer informative TV like Discovery, History, A&E, piano/violin concertos, Broadway musicals, animals of all kinds, and YouTube videos thereof. I found a male praying mantis (~3 cm long) in my dorm hallway once, brought it to my lab in a Tupperware, and took it hunting for mosquitoes every few hours for a week. Mantid poop looks like compressed mosquito shell fragments.