It's funny how little things can stop us doing big things sometimes. Last year I was playing quite a bit of chess and I started a quest to become the best chess player I could, hoping to reach NM (national master) status, I reckoned about a 1800 rating would do it. It was and still is a big task, but I figured I enjoy chess so much so that I watch a lot of chess content and have various apps on my phone that are designed to improve your game.

Then a really small and simple, yet absolutely crucial problem popped up, my mouse, which is an ergonomic joystick-style mouse, kept connecting and disconnecting as I was playing. Seeing as I liked to play one minute and two minute with 1 second increment (2/1) games this state of affairs was totally unacceptable. The amount of games I lost because my mouse suddenly disconnected with just a few seconds left on my clock, was ridiculous. In the end I just gave up because losing game after game like that started to really pee me off.

### What's In A Mouse?
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*"But Cryptogee, it's just a mouse, why didn't you just buy a new one?"*

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![old_mouse.PNG](https://images.hive.blog/DQmRD5E7ivYvpZeduQNNHKBbYNWUoexnE3dFRVcJaNyiZXq/old_mouse.PNG)


Good question; there were two reasons. The first, was that I need to use that style of mouse or I get terrible RSI in my wrist. If I use the normal style of mouse for more than a couple of days so that's out of the question and after trying to download and update various drivers, I realised that it wasn't going to ever work.

The second was that I did actually buy another one because I though the fault was with the mouth itself, and then I tried to find another one that looked the same, however the ones on Amazon at the time looked nothing like the one I had and just wouldn't have provided me with that same feeling.

### A New Dawn

Anyway, my laptop finally went doolally and I had to replace it, so off I trotted to Tottenham Court Road in central London and got me a nice shiny new Lenovo and eventually a new mouse. It's a bit different from the one I'm used to, but the principle is the same and my wrist is just fine when using it.


![New_mouse.PNG](https://images.hive.blog/DQmXyA8Exqdy1E8RdsM4u1PwVGYHrrmrEn9xYtf61s2puJN/New_mouse.PNG)


So back to Lichess! Unfortunately I seem to have reset as far as my blitz skills are concerned, I was never that great at the one and two minute games, but I had managed to get a rating of around 1000. Now I'm floating between about 840 on a bad day and around 930 or so on a good one.

I got my bullet rating on 5/3 games up to around 1500 last year, now I'm struggling to maintain above 1400, however I don't care, because at least I can play now and have some fun.

So the upshot of all of that is; 

## I'm Back!!

### The Future

So I'm going to post up games as usual, and I've also got a Twitch channel now and once I've figured out how to stream properly, I'll drop the link of that on my bio (if anyone has any Twitch tips I'd very much appreciate them!). Also once I hopefully get back to previous levels and beyond, I'll think about entering some competitions, I've seen they have a good one here on Hive so maybe I'll drop by and check that out.

As far as posting is concerned, I can't post to more than one Community at a time so I'll probably alternate between here and The Chess Community.

### The Game

Okay so lets get into it. This game was interesting, I've called it "When You're So Gangster Your Opponent Gives Up." Because I was pressuring this player and they just gave up when they should probably have continued. Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/cri01rzEs0M