Welcome to Mike Serovey on Chess!

The theme of this site is chess and the main focus of this site is analysis of the games of Mike Serovey (that’s me), with diagrams. Most of the stuff that I cover is pretty basic and includes general theory as well as specific analysis of certain positions and move orders.

This is one of my personal hobby sites. The games will be from 1983 on and one game is from 1976. I will be adding more games from the 1970′s as I find them. Some of these games are good examples of how not to play chess.

I got to thinking about something recently and decided to post it here. If you were to look up my current USCF over-the-board (OTB) rating you will see that I’m only rated in the 1500 range. My latest USCF correspondence rating is 1850. So, I’m clearly not a master at chess! When I joined the US Army back in 1977 I wasn’t taught how to be a soldier by a general or senior NCO. I was taught by one buck sergeant (E-5) and a bunch of staff sergeants (E-6). I rarely saw the company commander or first sergeant. Mid-level NCOs could teach me how to be a soldier, to include how to march, shoot a rifle, polish my boots, make my bunk, etc. When I got to AIT (Advanced Individual Training) it was again mid-level NCOs that taught me how to read a map and compute fire data for canons.  My point here is that chess beginners and chess novices do not need a chess master, and certainly not a chess GM, to teach them the rules of the game and some basic strategy. They can learn from someone at my level. Someone who is already at my level needs to learn from a chess master or above.

If you have been playing chess for more than ten years and are higher rated than I am you might not get much out of my advice given here for free. Even if you are currently rated higher than I am, if you have not been playing for very long you might want to take advantage of my 30 + years of tournament experience. There are some things that can only be learned by experience and you might as well take advantage of mine!

Another thing to consider is this, practice against someone whose chess rating is about 200 points above where you are rated. If you go too much above that you will lose every chess game and become discouraged. If you go much below that level you will not learn anything new. Easy wins at chess may be fun for a while, but improvement comes with studying chess and practicing chess against better players than where you are currently rated.

My site visitors may have noticed that I have held back in publishing some of my best analysis on this site. That is partly because my previous opponents know about this site and I don’t want to give someone that I might play again my best moves for free! However, I am setting up a members only area that you can access for free after you have registered here. The idea is to build a list of contacts and restrict my best stuff to those who will actually appreciate it. There will also be a paid members area that will have information not found anywhere else on this site. I will post notices when all of this is ready.

In order to make room on my web server for new material I have deleted all of the interactive game pages created with Palview 4. I have also deleted the chess site notifier and the Alexa certificate. I have added a shop where you can purchase chess books, boards and sets.

New location for Mike Hoffer’s Chess Academy, chess club and chess tournaments

Go to the Contact Page to get directions to the site from Google Maps

What’s New?

December 8, 2011 – I have added a page of cross tables from chess tournaments that I either played in or directed going back as far as I can right now. New cross tables will be added to that page as they become available.

April 22, 2012 – The problems that I was having with this template have been fixed and I am now in the process of adding 301 redirects from my old HTML pages to these newer pages. I have also added and updated some WordPress plugins that will make this site better. The chess tournament cross tables have been updated and so has the picture gallery.