My name is Arno Middelkoop and I live in the Netherlands. I'm currently twentytwo, and I've been playing this wonderful game from the age of seven.

In that year, 1995, I joined the local chessclub here in Zoetermeer, Botwinnik. I enjoyed playing with fellow novice yooth players, and I intended to become a better player than most of them and did that. Even so, in the six years to come I probably only reached an official rating ~1500, not being active in any external competition.

As of November 2010, my KNSB rating is 1793. Although this shows some increase in strength (up from as low as 1643 a year back) I'm not at all stable. In the top tier of the Hague competition (Botwinnik 2 board 1) I played 1 out of 4 thus far, two draws. This is on ~2000 level, and it shows I might just not be ready for that.

Besides chess I'm following a university course: Biomedical Sciences at the University of Leiden. I should have been long Bachelor degreed, but because of personal and internship related problems in 2010 I flunked the internship I did, getting me to trail behind: currently I'm occupied by an internship in Epidemiology and Statistics, and this suits me much more than what I did.

Besides both chess and education I'm a Japanese RPG, Anime and Manga fan, although it has been less and less occupying the last years: I enjoy the franchise more than actually being an addict.

I (still) have a general addiction for World of Warcraft, playing Cataclysm now and my rogue Qoko (Europian Kor'gall) is already lv85.

My online chess occupation changed completely. I quitted FICS and started to play on jijbent.nl under the alias of Qoko (just as WoW). The site's equivalent is yourturnmyturn.com in English (the Dutch site is the founder though). This way of playing is more correspondence based, I kind of neglect blitz and rapid, I don't like it.

Where you find me here: I am almost always occupied on the daily puzzle, as well as screening and sometimes posting on the GotD. However, aside liking to comment on less common games, I started to lurk the recent tournaments a bit more, refreshing my grandmaster chess knowledge.