Why is my nick name Chess Gal?

I get this all the time, from forums to chat rooms and to new friends that I meet.

Why is my nick name and email is named as such. Truth is, well, you could have easily guessed it. I was a Chess fan when I was younger or maybe not too young, 14 years old?.

My bunch of classmates were Chess addicts, Jui Kenn, Nazmi & Paul were my then Si-Fus. They would bring along chess sets to play during recess or just at any point in time when teachers are called for 'Mesyuarat' or just MIA.

The three of them trained me on the fundamentals of Chess AND that's all, honestly! Especially Jui Kenn who is sooo selfish to share his strategies with me and refused to teach me despite I offered to be his GF!!! Hahahah.. then I bought a few Chess books to learn on my own. Those books are not cheap, RM60 for one, the cheapest that I've found.

I guess, the books served me pretty well. I won my very first individual tournament on my very first attempt. My team mates and the three sifus who also won their respective individual event were dumb-folded. Melissa??? Noone even know who I was that year. I was a newbie in this arena.

In the first game, I was paired to play against a Convent Kajang girl, her name was Cindy Foo. Convent Kajang team was one of the favourites, and Cindy was the prior year top three girls. My team mates were pretty new and one by one they were slaughtered by the Convent girls. I was the only one left battling on the first table (First table is like the best player table). Seeing my team mates being beaten senselessly, being the Captain, I cannot let them down. I played my very best and checkmated her in a damn stylo manner. Her King was forced to the corner of the board and my double rook checkmated her defenseless King.

I performed really well that year, won 4 games, drew one and lost my final game to the champion. Was also selected to play at the State level, trained with Siti Zulaikha (The National Women Masters in Msia) and met a lot of great players.

But guessed I ran out of luck in the following years. I still win medals in each tournament nevertheless but it was team event, no longer individual. (Cause I trained my teammates ;P). Winning as a team was better, no one gets left behind but sadly, I no longer play at the State level.

Ah... those were the days. Oh yeah, I played for my college too and won twice at the IMU-MAPCU Chess Tournament. That tournament not only was my last in college (few days before graduation) but was also the medal that gave me the edge to be choosen as the Valedictorian, apart from my ahem CGPA 4.0. (Alec is so going to kill me for keeping bragging on my CGPA).

Oh yeah my nick name. Since my first tournament, I signed off as Chess Lissa on my scoresheet. Scoresheet is piece of paper where we note down our move and once the game is over, both players sign off, keep the carbon copy and pass the originals to the Arbitor. The copy is for players to analyse where they went wrong or right.

My email address was Chess_Lissa@hotmail.com that time until it got spammed with junk mails so bad that I decided to open a new email account. So I name is Chess_Gal.