Author: Dawn

I'm Dawn Lawson, a librarian and translator. When I'm not at my day job or struggling with 19th-century Japanese, I'm doing something related to chess. I've found the online chess community in Twitter and elsewhere to be super welcoming, and I wanted to give back by sharing a record of my own experiences with this great pastime.

Review: Two Resources about Chess and Mindfulness

Review: Two Resources about Chess and Mindfulness

Published by Dawn on February 19, 2024

As an adult chess improver with a longtime interest in Eastern spirituality, when I heard that a book called Mindful Chess was coming out, I was thrilled. Ok; I was thrilled once I got over the disappointment that someone had used a title that I had thought might fit the book that is gestating inside me. Now that I have read GM Paul van der Sterren’s Mindful Chess, though, I’m just delighted that he has given the chess community this readable account of his experience of two paths, that of chess and that of mindfulness. That is not all, however. At nearly the same time that Mindful Chess is being published, GM van der Sterren is also releasing In Black and White: The Chess Autobiography of a World Champion Candidate, the English translation of his 2011 Dutch autobiography. Both Mindful Chess and In Black and White have just been published by New in Chess. Amazon will have the autobiography at the end of February and Mindful Chess in mid-March. Ben Johnson has also just released a very in-depth interview of GM van der Sterren on the latest episode of his Perpetual Chess podcast. It’s a great time to learn about this fascinating member of the chess community.

Serendipitously, as I was reading Mindful Chess I learned that there was a mindfulness course consisting of video and audio tracks for chess players, created by Dr. Benjamin Portheault, a performance coach for mental athletes who specializes in chess. Mindfulness for the Tournament Player is built around the schedule of a chess tournament, with guided meditations for each stage of the event. A bonus feature helps you create a meditation based on one of your own best chess performances. I was especially moved by the lovingkindness mediations he includes in the section for after the tournament.

I’m really glad that mindfulness is becoming a part of the chess scene; if ever there was a pastime whose participants needed mindfulness, chess is it. I had been meditating daily for three years when I got into chess, but the 20-minute time slot that I had been using for meditation was soon more than usurped by my morning chess game and post-game analysis. I rationalized that chess required such intense concentration that it could replace meditation, which is true, to some extent. While I was working full time there wasn’t time for both in the morning, but I vowed to restart meditation once I retired, and that time has come. These resources–and the struggle I am having with how I feel after a chess loss–have convinced me to get my cushion out once again.

Mindful Chess is, fittingly, organized like a chess game, from setting up the pieces through the endgame. Each segment consists of a series of short essays in which van der Sterren talks about how he got into meditation toward the end of his career as a competitive chess player, while weaving in helpful explanations of the Buddhist concepts of impermanence, suffering, and no-self. He describes his first trying experience at a long meditation retreat, with insightful analysis of his pain points that I strongly recommend for anyone in a similar situation. After retiring from competitive chess, GM van der Sterren even taught meditation for a few years, but now his journey includes more chess than mindfulness. In addition to his discussions probing the Buddhist concepts mentioned above, his explanations of these evolutions make Mindful Chess a truly engaging read.

When you put down Mindful Chess, you will be eager to get started using mindfulness on your chess journey, and that is where Dr. Portheault’s course comes in. The two complement and reinforce each other so well, for example, where GM van der Sterren refers to waves of anger breaking on the rocks of mindfulness, Dr. Portheault refers to transforming the stormy sea in which we find ourselves after a loss into a realization that we were the calm ocean all along. Even if, like me, you have not yet been to a tournament, the meditations–especially the segments “Before the Game,” “After a Loss,” and “After a Win”–are easily adaptable to whenever you play your regular non-tournament games.

No one is claiming that adding mindfulness to your chess routine will increase your rating, but there is no doubt that it will make you able to weather a challenging journey with far more equanimity, especially with the aid of these two resources.

Mantras for Chess Players

Mantras for Chess Players

Published by Dawn on December 4, 2023

Ambition without Expectations Recently GM Noël Studer published a blog post with this title, which led me once again to reflect on the need for a Buddhist mentality when you are grappling with the challenging pastime of chess. I am thinking of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: that Life is suffering, that Desire (attachment) is the cause of suffering, that there is a Way to let go of suffering, and that following the Way is the way to let go of suffering. Every time we desire things to be other than they are, we suffer. As Noël writes, “Reality minus Expectations equals Well Being.” While I know that I will never achieve this mentality perfectly, I like the way it reminds me to try to let go of that intense focus on results in the form of wins and improved rating.

You Win or You Learn One hears this a lot in the adult improver world, and it is a helpful reminder that the letter L can stand for more than loss. But I have to admit that I become impatient with it from time to time, because sometimes it seems like the only thing to learn from a game is that I can still blunder my queen or mouse slip or play too quickly when I think I see an amazing tactic that is really an amazing way to lose a piece.

Connect to Vanquish Shame I heard words to this effect on a recent podcast from The Ono Zone. The idea is from Brené Brown via Ono’s wife, Yara. I know, shame is a heavy word and might feel a bit strong to apply to how you feel about your plummeting (or not-rising-as-fast-as-you-think-it-should) rating or your latest loss. But when we try to figure out why it can be so damned devastating to lose at this silly game when losses at other games just don’t match that feeling in intensity, it seems to have something to do with chess being considered a game of intelligence. Even if we know that this is an over-generalization, it is easy for a loss to tap into feelings of shame over not being smart enough or good enough or worse. This can lead to a strong temptation to go crawl in a hole or under the covers or inside a bottle. But the only thing that will help shame is exposing it to the light of day, in the form of a trusted friend or fellow walker on the adult improver path. This is what makes the chess Twitter discussions of failure and frustration so precious. There are people who have felt just as you do, and they are always there to listen.

Progress not Perfection This comes from the Twelve Step programs and is an excellent principle to have in your quiver. But it’s not too helpful for adult improvers, who tend to decide what progress means instead of accepting it. And we often think that what it means is a bigger ratings jump—or even title—than is possible for us to achieve in the amount of time that we have decided it should take.

Anyone Can Beat Anyone Lots of people say this, but when I heard Sara Herman say it, it really stuck with me. Of course this can be taken in two ways—you can beat anyone and anyone can beat you. Adult improvers seem to me to be a glass-half-empty bunch, so we are probably inclined to think of the latter interpretation. From where we sit, we know it is highly unlikely that we would ever beat the grandmasters at the top of the chess heap. But I have found some constructive ways to think about “anyone can beat you.” One is to remind myself not to get too giddy after taking someone’s queen or getting far ahead in material some other way. Strangely, even though I think that I always feel very humble about the little chess ability I have and that I never relax, feeling certain of victory in a game, I actually do relax. I have given back that queen later in the game countless times and seen a double-digit lead in material peter away to nothing or even to a balance in the opponent’s favor. I have really tried to watch for evidence of my relaxing during a game, and I’ve noticed that I have had the opening principles of Develop, Control the Center, and Get Your King to Safety so drilled into me that when I see the opponent not doing any of this I subconsciously decide that I can beat him. Well, guess what? Anyone can beat anyone.

Reframe the Thoughts That Hurt Your Chess

Reframe the Thoughts That Hurt Your Chess

Published by Dawn on October 10, 2023

One of the great things about chess is the singularity of attention that it requires. But during the game, thoughts about our performance can still creep in–especially when we blunder or feel that we are in danger of losing–and these can hurt our game. The thoughts we have before and after the game can affect us as well. Here is a sampling of mine, along with the arguments I use to try to counteract them.

I’m never going to get good at chess.

When is never and what is good? The more I think about this one, the more I think it is simply an expression of impatience at how long it takes to improve at chess, which is likely the result of an unrealistic idea of how much improvement is possible in a given time frame. Chess improvement comes slowly and at a different pace for each person. Period.

My opponent is higher rated and thus has every chance of winning.

Have you ever seen a sports team that looks great on paper and performs miserably? (Hello 2023 NY Mets, whose highest-in-baseball payroll didn’t even get them a winning record.) Why? Because baseball isn’t played on paper, and neither is chess. You know how your own performance and rating fluctuate in either direction? So do those of your opponent. The one number that appears on a given day cannot possibly be a complete representation of a person’s chess performance. There are a zillion scenarios in which you could defeat someone with a higher rating, the most obvious one being that they are having a bad day and you are having a good one.

My opponent is lower rated, so I must not lose. If I lose, I’ll be a laughingstock to myself and anyone who knows my chess app usernames. Besides, I’m a better player than my rating indicates, so I will have lost by a bigger rating gap than it looks, which will hurt even more.

Do you know any chess players who have never lost to someone with a lower rating? It just isn’t possible. Do you have the leisure time to look up the chess usernames of your fellow players and look down your nose at them when you see that they have lost to an opponent who was lower rated? Do you really think that your chess performance is completely, unerringly represented by that one number? Of course not. Besides, when you lose to someone with a lower rating, you will have brought a little chess happiness into their life.

All of my opponents have some secret chess knowledge that I’m not privy to (or I’m not smart enough to absorb) so even if I play without blunders, they’ll get me in the end.

This can be a tough feeling to combat. When, like me, you are in a lower rating range, you encounter a lot of trap setters and people who don’t follow the opening principles that your teacher insists on (controlling the center, developing your pieces, and getting your king to safety). Such people–I call them tricksets–still beat you sometimes. But they aren’t using secret chess knowledge, just gimmicky traps that will keep them in that lower range, while your fundamentals will stand you in good stead as you climb.

Oh, no, I blundered my queen! I’m a goner.

Yes, it is daunting when you didn’t see that bishop way across the board, and now your opponent has plus 9. Or more. But if you’ve played for any length of time at all you’ve seen an opponent blunder their own queen several moves after you lost yours. It happens. When it doesn’t, just take this as a reminder to be vigilant, always. As they say, it’s win, lose, or learn, and this is a reminder that even when you think you are blunder-checking without consciously thinking about it, you can still miss something.

Why did I ever think chess was enjoyable? I hate the way I feel when I lose. I have to blink back the tears whenever I blunder a high-value piece or see that checkmate coming.

Why? Because you have enjoyed playing many times, and you always enjoy studying it and talking about it. It’s like anything in life–when you are in the midst of experiencing some pain, you want to quit. Why do you think there is the saying “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”? I know, losing at chess hurts. And the high you get from winning at chess is much more fleeting than the pain of losing. But maybe one reason chess is here is to teach us not to take these things so hard and to realize what is really important in life. Those are invaluable lessons at any age.

Note: The illustration above is a magnetic frame available from Zazzle.

Takeways from My First Podcast Appearance

Takeways from My First Podcast Appearance

Published by Dawn on July 25, 2023

I had the great good fortune of being interviewed by Kevin Scull recently on his podcast, Chess Journeys. I actually tried to refuse him at first by saying that my rating was too low to make me a worthy guest, but fortunately he felt otherwise. We had a delightful conversation. I had assumed we would because I knew from listening to him that Keven asks interesting and sometimes quirky follow-up questions and injects a lot of himself into the conversation. Beyond recording the episode, I have experienced a lot of pleasure from the reactions that friends and other adult improvers have communicated to me. I am especially grateful to the friends who don’t know anything about chess and listened to the entire hour anyway! I have also garnered a number of new subscribers to this blog as a result. What a great experience!

Recording the podcast also had another great consequence that I would never have anticipated. It made me feel like a legitimate member of the chess community. I have let my low rating and slow climb make me feel like I don’t belong with the other adult improvers on chess Twitter. In general, people with ratings lower than say, 800 or 1000, don’t show up online or on podcasts. I hadn’t given this much thought–if any–until someone who emailed in response to my blog pointed out that people at my level don’t usually put themselves out there as I was. That gave me pause, and when I reread my blog recently and saw that I had included a screenshot from chess.com showing my (at the time) all-time-high rating of 539 I did feel a bit embarrassed. But that was not so much because I had put that out there, but because of how incredibly high that number felt to me at the time. Now that I’ve been playing longer, I’ve observed that a new high rating–especially one you have been longing for for some time–sounds the highest before you attain it and a few minutes afterward. Then it very quickly loses its luster. It’s sad, really. Psychologists have various terms for this, such as the “arrival fallacy” or “hedonic adaptation.” An example of the latter that is often given is a person who wins a large amount of money in the lottery and is initially happier but eventually falls back into their former level of happiness or unhappiness.

I’m not sure why being on the podcast made me feel more “legitimate,” or even what I mean by that. But somehow it made me feel that there is not as much difference among us adult improvers as I had thought our rating numbers indicated. We all started from the same place and are generally interested in hearing about others’ chess beginnings. We all care about our rating, albeit to different degrees. And we all keep playing even after we have realized that our progress is never quite enough to satisfy us. The title of Kevin’s podcast and of this blog both include the word “journey.” Remember that kind of sappy saying, “Life is a journey, not a destination”? Well, it’s true about chess, too.

Does Chess Have To Torment Us?

Does Chess Have To Torment Us?

Published by Dawn on May 30, 2023

Losing at chess hurts. Even staying at the same rating level in chess for a prolonged period is hard, especially when you are practicing and studying the game regularly. I know that I am not alone in this because we have a wonderfully supportive community on Twitter and via podcasts, where this phenomenon is discussed a lot. Not infrequently someone will declare that they are quitting chess because the positive feelings they experience when they win are not as intense or lasting as what they feel when they lose.

Chess is a great game–does it have to torment us so much? To understand this more deeply I started asking myself questions when experiencing negative feelings about losing or being stuck at the same rating. It was like peeling the proverbial onion, including the tears, and I seemed to have to pause at each layer of skin for a time before I could resume my activity.

I started by simply asking myself, “So what?” I lost a game. So what? I play almost every day, so it makes sense that I would lose sometimes. Myriad variables are in play each time, for both me and my opponent. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard for this is that when you play chess you either win or you learn. There is always a takeaway from a loss, albeit sometimes a frustrating one (I blundered my queen! Again. Will I ever stop doing that? Probably not, as a matter of fact. Just Google grandmaster blunder queen.)

What about the rating plateau? For that I asked myself a question that can be helpful for putting things in perspective: “What’s the worst that could happen?” I could be stuck in this plateau forever, and wouldn’t that be an indication that I have already progressed as far as possible for someone who started as late as I did, in my mid-sixties, and who has the same intelligence and skills as I do. Maybe my rating will never go higher than it was at the end of January. That would be disappointing in general because I feel that my hard work should be paying dividends. A more specific disappointment is that I have hoped to play chess someday IRL instead of just with strangers online, and I don’t think I would feel comfortable playing with others in a club situation with my rating at its present level.

“What if the plateau isn’t permanent, but it is going to take an indeterminate amount of time for improvement to show in my rating?” I should be fine with that, I think. There is absolutely no rush. I am not training for a chess tournament, and I don’t plan to have my rating engraved on my tombstone. But I am not fine with it. Indeterminate amounts of time are always unsettling for me. At my age, I don’t have all the time in the world. And I do worry that it is some kind of self-esteem issue. Like most chess players, I am a driven person who takes on a lot of intellectual challenges and derives feelings of self-worth from mastering them. But I would hope that I don’t need more validation at this stage of my life. If I do, I think chess is the wrong place to be seeking it.

The inevitable next question is, “Are you still enjoying the game?” Yes, of course. I usually enjoy it right up until I see that the loss of a particular game is inevitable. But will I still enjoy it if I am at this same rating a year from now? I don’t think so, and that is especially because of that feeling that my work must pay off, and soon!

A common thread runs through my desire to win and my insistence that my rating rise constantly. That thread is expectation and a desire for things to be other than what they are, to occur on my timeframe, not the natural one. As is true of so many things in life, chess requires a heavy dose of acceptance. There is no formula written anywhere that says that a certain amount of daily chess practice and study will result in a specific amount of improvement in a specific amount of time. There couldn’t be, right? We are all unique. Everyone in the same language class or music class doesn’t end up with the same amount of skill. Another helpful thought is that my rating is not me. The rating is just a construct. It’s a thing outside of me. I can try to observe it the way I would a phenomenon of nature, without attaching any feelings to it. Isn’t that why lichess.org calls its rating-masking mode, “Zen mode”? Chess has more to teach me than I realized.

Avoiding Thought Blunders

Avoiding Thought Blunders

Published by Dawn on April 3, 2023

After hiring Ono as my chess coach, I decided to read some of his early blog entries so that I could learn what his journey had been like at the beginning. I started with the post entitled “My First Months in Chess: The Adult Beginner Diary.” In it, he mentions an episode of the Perpetual Chess podcast that featured Dr. Jana Krivec, and how it had helped his chess mindset. Knowing that my own chess mindset needs a lot of work, I checked out Dr. Krivec’s conversation with Ben Johnson right away. I was so affected by it that I went on to read the book that was the occasion for her appearance, Improve Your Life by Playing a Game (2021). The book is an absolute gold mine of information about the relationship between our thinking and our chess performance. It also includes many inspirational quotations and one-minute exercises that illustrate her points, as well as a sprinkling of chess puzzles that she also ties into the discussion.

How is she able to do all of this? Well, Dr. Krivec is both a seven-time winner of the Slovenian Women’s Championship and a professor of psychology in Slovenia. She deftly combines these two areas of expertise in Improve Your Life by Playing a Game, condensing the underlying psychological research in a readily understandable way and supplementing it with useful illustrations.

The structure of the book is chess-player-friendly, beginning with training and then covering all aspects of tournament participation, from preparation to during and after the game as well as after the tournament. Even if a chess tournament is not in your immediate plans, everything in that section applies equally well to chess in your living room or at the local club, be it virtual or IRL. The final section of the book discusses chess education and documents the ways chess can benefit our health.

Although a great strength of the book is the wide variety of evidence-based advice it contains, the parts of the book that helped my game immediately were in the subsections “During a Chess Game” and “Coping with Stress and Losses.” The latter section discusses how to recognize and correct cognitive distortions. Ono had gotten me started on this road by suggesting that my game analyses include an account of how I was feeling during key moments. Until I did so, I hadn’t realized the extent to which negative thoughts were plaguing me the minute I sat down at the (virtual) board. I observed that even before the first move, I had always already decided that the other player was better than I was. My rating is still quite low, but I have the app set to match me with people within 100 points in either direction, so they can’t all be better, right? I was also burdening myself with the paradoxical belief that whether they started out by attempting a trick like Wayward Queen or by playing a traditional opening, both showed that they had more chess knowledge than I did. Writing about it now, it is easy for me to see how silly and illogical all of this is, but one insidious aspect of negative thoughts is that they can operate just below the surface, where you can’t talk back to them because you don’t know they are there.

As someone who has sat through more than one course of cognitive behavioral therapy, I know how uncomfortable or even silly it can feel to articulate those negative thoughts. Take, for example, one of my most blatant cognitive distortions. In one game, the opponent lined up his two bishops on adjacent squares, and I panicked. My thought was, “I’ve heard of something called checkmate with two bishops, and that’s going to happen. I’m done for.” Reviewing the game while recollecting this thought showed me that the bishops were far away from my king, with many pieces in between!

Before I read this book, I had learned the chess mantra, “You either win or learn something.” I’ve now modified this to, “Every day I’m learning something more about chess and myself.”

I have just two minor quibbles with this book. One, there is no electronic edition. When I was only able to find print copies of Krivec’s book, I reached out to the author to ask whether an electronic edition might become available. Happily, she responded that her publishers had said that they expect to issue one in July of this year. Two, I worry that the lack of the word chess in its title and subtitle (Improve Your Life by Playing a Game–Learn How to Turn Your Life Activities into Lifelong Skills) limits the book’s reach. I am sympathetic to the idea that the many tips and thinking techniques assembled could be applied to other games. But in the final analysis, the book is very chess-centric. I hope that Ben’s podcast, Ono’s blog post, and this piece will help it reach the audience it deserves.

“Tilt”: A New Word in My Vocabulary

“Tilt”: A New Word in My Vocabulary

Published by Dawn on February 25, 2023

Until I began following chess Twitter and listening to chess podcasts, the word “tilt” only meant “on a slant” to me. From the contexts in which I was seeing it used now, I realized it had to do with losing, but the Urban dictionary said there was more to it:

. . . an emotional state when doing the exact same activity over and over produces negative results. It’s an emotional breakdown and frustration of your hard work not resulting in the success that you crave so desperately. When you or someone is in a tilt state of mind, the best thing to do is take a break from that activity and try not to think about it as much.

I am there. I was within striking distance of an all-time-high rating of 600 (I know, not a big deal to most of you, but. . .) at the end of last month. Since then, I have engaged a new teacher—a true coach, this time. I used to wonder what the difference was between a chess teacher and a chess coach, and now I know. My new coach is working for me all the time. All. The. Time. I can send a What’s App message about any aspect of my chess and know I will receive a thoughtful answer shortly. He is very conversant with the chess literature and chess videos, which enabled him to create a study plan perfectly tailored to my needs. I should probably be messaging him instead of writing this (actually, before censoring it, my husband suggested I send the original draft of this piece to him and to my [non-chess] therapist.) But I don’t want to come off as horribly needy in our first few weeks of work. It will just seem like I am asking him to say that I can and will get better. No doubt I have already transmitted the need for that kind of reassurance anyway. The lifetime good student in me, who managed to attain three graduate degrees, just wants to get better, partly to please him, and does not want to require any hand holding.

As long as I am still enjoying it, the only reason I would ever quit chess is if I thought I could not improve and was still at such a low level that it was hard to find decent opponents. I’m 64, so I do think I should be on the lookout for that kind of plateau. But from here, I feel that if I could just get to say, 800, I would keep at it, even if my rating never increased beyond three digits. I say that because I have a lot of experience playing strangers on chess.com who rate between 400 and 600. Many of them attempt Scholar’s Mate or other early tricks and tend to resign when their trick fails and they have almost inevitably blundered their queen. Those games get old after a while. The proportion of such tricks seems to go down somewhat above the 500 rating level, leading me to hope that it will evaporate entirely as one ascends. (I should say that I have not met many such tricksters on lichess.com, but it is hard to get a slower time control there in the lowly ranges.)

And speaking of the lowly ranges, one thing that makes tilting harder is that I don’t see many chess improvers below 800 tweeting, blogging, or otherwise making their existence known. The wonderful people whose content I devour via chess Twitter and podcasts all appear to have high ratings. Yes, there are adult improver podcasts, but they have usually improved to a level that I can only dream of, and not much lip service is paid to their presumably brief stays in the sub-four-digit rating band.

The Urban dictionary advice above notwithstanding, I do not intend to take a break from my pursuit of chess mediocrity. In addition, I should fully disclose that my coach has told me that all of the wonderful information he has been imparting to me in these early weeks may be causing my tilt. Yes, you read that right. In other words, I may be hyperfocusing on certain aspects of the game (and heaven knows, there are many) to the complete exclusion of others while I assimilate new knowledge. I can only hope that he is right.

[Image Credit: Captain Raju]

My Chess Year

My Chess Year

Published by Dawn on January 10, 2023

The end of 2022 coincided roughly with the end of my first full year of studying chess (although I lost a couple of months dealing with a knee that ultimately had to be replaced). Soon after I started playing, I set a ratings goal for myself of 600. It amuses me to think of this now, because when I set it I had no idea that there were many different ratings systems, which are not easily translatable to one another. I finished the year with a chess.com rapid rating of 556, and although I am as eager as always to go higher–especially to reach 660 so that I can climb out of the Chess Dojo Training basement–I am pretty satisfied with this for my first year mark. My satisfaction with it increased after I heard Daniel Lona talk with Amy Shaw about ratings on the Chess Experience podcast. They were saying that one number cannot possibly represent all the nuances of someone’s chess performance and suggested thinking of your rating as a range of minus or plus 50 from that number. Which conveniently makes my 2022 rating 506-606. Although I am now very aware of the vagaries of ratings and the pros and cons of using them as a measure of one’s chess, I am still going to set myself a ratings goal for 2023–800.

As with ratings, when I first started playing chess I don’t think I really understood anything about the various time controls. Basically I played whatever time was put before me, which usually happened to be 10 minutes or less (per side) because I was in group settings online designed for people to be able to play multiple games in a short time. It took surprisingly long for me to realize that I needed more time to think about my moves and that I might play much better given the opportunity to do so. Eventually I settled on a time control of 30 minutes per side when seeking playing partners online, and that has been a revelation. Not only has my chess been better, but the opponents with whom I am matched tend to be more serious players, that is, not all tricksters who lead with a “wayward queen attack.” Presumably that goes hand in hand with the fact that a 30 minute time control means that the game can go as long as 60 minutes. Even with 30 minutes, I am losing on time sometimes, but as a relative beginner I don’t think I need to worry about that too much. I assume that more proficiency will bring about some gains in speed.

For a number of months after I started playing, when I didn’t have a friend to play with in person or online, I played against the chess bots of lichess.org and chess.com. This felt easy and safe, I guess because no one was watching (chess.com does not even store those games in your record, although lichess.does). I can’t remember why, but one day I realized that my chess would probably improve more if I played real people instead. It may sound strange, but this takes a bit of courage. Even if you will never meet this person in the flesh and likely never encounter them again online, they are a real person, which triggers a deeper level of accountability than does a bot. I also discovered that playing people around my rating level was the most rewarding for me. Too much lower, and it is not challenging enough; too much higher, and you are so busy defending/being intimidated/dreading the loss that you can’t enjoy or learn from the superior player.

The lessons discussed above can be put more succinctly as: Play real people, around your rating, at a time control that suits your chess ability. In earlier blog posts I also recommend getting a coach and analyzing your games. I plan to keep all of these things in mind in 2023 as I continue to savor this incredibly interesting and amazingly difficult pastime.

More Progress, Less Satisfaction

More Progress, Less Satisfaction

Published by Dawn on November 8, 2022

My rating continued to climb after my last post, going from the mid-300s to just over 500. Recently, though, I seem to be in a plateau around that half-thousand figure, and it’s frustrating. Why? Well, the first reason is due to a misconception of mine. As I’ve mentioned, I’m in the Chess Dojo training program, which is sensibly divided into rating ranges, with different assigned tasks for each range. I’m in the lowest, which is labeled 0-400. I was eagerly awaiting getting to 400 on one of the online chess platforms, chess.com. It would feel so good to “graduate” and not be in the lowliest cohort anymore. But I had neither read the fine print nor remembered that everything involving chess has to be complicated. There are a zillion different rating systems in chess. It is not like, say, batting average. Even chess.com and lichess.org, our main playing spaces, do not agree. My ~500 on chess.com is not greater than the 400 of Chess Dojo, which uses FIDE, the system of the International Chess Federation, admittedly a more legitimate standard to use. However, the fine print says that the 0-400 band covers ratings of up to 650 on chess.com.

I know, your eyes may be glazing over and you are thinking that this is too much obsessing about numbers. But the other drawback of a low rating is that it is a little lonely at the bottom. Although you can learn from facing opponents who have ratings significantly lower or higher than yours, and you should of course play them occasionally, the ideal chess opponent is someone near your level. It’s just the right degree of challenge, and both players have a chance of winning and gaining a few rating points. As I write this, there are about 65 people enrolled in the 0-400 band of the Chess Dojo training program, which has been hugely successful–more than its creators envisioned–recently attaining its 1,000th participant. But only 15 or so members of that lowest cohort have a chess.com rating below 600, like me. Why? Well, Chess Dojo lets you sign up for whatever cohort you want, and they provide such good training of the fundamentals of chess that people want to spend time at the lower levels to make sure their chess foundation is solid. That’s all good. But one of my hopes for the program was to find serious people around my rating to play with–instead of those wonderful random strangers I play online every day.

Our rating band recently had a tournament. Only six people, or about 10 percent of the cohort, entered, and during the three-week period of the tournament, two of those “graduated” to the next level up. So I played one person at my rating level and two who were considerably higher. I finished last, with 0 wins. This sounds like I am blaming my poor performance on the rating differentials, but I am not. My teacher has said that I can defeat anyone–especially those with ratings up to 1,000–as long as I don’t blunder, and that has given me some wind under my wings. I went into the tournament games thinking that I could win any game, but in each case I eventually blundered. I did capitalize on a blunder made by the opponent at exactly my level, but not enough to win. The tournament was actually a great experience for me. These were the longest games I had ever played. Although the training program suggests that people in the 0-400 band play games no longer than 30 minutes per side, the tournament games were 90 minutes per side. One of my games lasted for 2 hours and 20 minutes! This is excellent training for over-the-board tournaments, which generally have long time controls. But I think my brain needs more practice before it can correctly calculate “if he takes this, and I take that, and he takes this, and I take that. . .” for more than an hour at a stretch.

In any event, a new tournament for our band has been announced, and I will soldier on, no matter the ratings of the other entrants. If I defeat someone with a higher rating, I get more rating points, so maybe I will graduate one of these days. At least I know I’ll be playing with people who care enough about their chess improvement to pay to join a training program, and when schedules permit we meet online to do a post-mortem of the game and/or compare written analyses, essential pieces of any chess improvement plan.

Some Progress, Finally

Some Progress, Finally

Published by Dawn on September 27, 2022

Just as I was beginning to think that my chess would never improve, it did–not so much in rating points–but very definitely in my ability to look at the board and evaluate my positions. In the past, I would sometimes avoid playing because of loss of confidence following a loss. My finger would hover over the “Play” button on chess.com, never making contact, or I would stare at the lichess lobby (where one looks for available games) for minutes on end, never daring to make a selection.

Finally, I told myself that in order to make online playing less of a source of anxiety, I would have to do it often. I set a goal of one game per day, with someone within one or two hundred points of my rating, and a time control of 30 minutes. I found that lichess was not practical on weekdays because there were not enough suitable players. But there is always someone who matches my parameters on the behemoth chess.com.

The first day of my new program was a Sunday, and I amazed myself by attempting three games on lichess. I played well in the first one, leading my opponent to resign early. Encouraged, and because that game had been rather short, I tried again. This may be hard to believe given what is going on in professional chess today, or maybe it will be easy to believe for the same reason, but after a few moves in that game lichess let me know that my opponent had been found to be cheating. The game was stopped, and points were added to my rating, so I decided to play again. This third time, though, I lost.

From the beginning of my online chess playing I have always looked at the helpful game reviews provided by the apps, and eventually I myself started analyzing and annotating games without first referring to the app’s review. But I think that this particular game marked the first time that I was able to clearly analyze what it was in my emotional state during the game that led me to lose–another sign of my improvement. The opponents I am matched with in my lowly rating band often do not follow the accepted rules that beginners are told to live by early in the game: developing their pieces, bringing their king to safety, and not bringing the queen out too early. Such novices move a few pawns and then quickly and dramatically sweep their queen across a diagonal toward my side of the board. There are some early checkmates that can happen if one is not aware of the threats that this behavior poses, one of which is called “The Wayward Queen Attack.” I have studied some of these, but like most things, if I don’t experience them or refer back to my notes, I can be caught unawares when they actually happen. Thus I have tended to panic when a queen comes my way early, and on that particular Sunday morning, I did so, in a big way. Since that game, however, I have finally been able to do something that I had previously been unable to, which is to follow the advice of my teacher and others to simply stay calm and analyze what threats the queen might pose, defending against them one-by-one. Since that panicky Sunday morning, I have won at least two games simply by doing this.

It has been two weeks since I began playing daily. My heartbeat still accelerates when I first get into the game, but not nearly as much as it used to do. Also, I have adopted a new behavior when I am playing on chess.com, where the opponent’s rating is displayed in the upper left corner of the screen, so that it is possible to play without looking at it. On lichess you can hide all ratings by going to Settings and scrolling down to the last option under Display (thanks, chess Twitter, for pointing this out!). Also, I implemented the suggestion of another teacher to turn off chat in chess.com (no more “Hurry up, Bro” and worse). Recently on chess twitter someone posted three rules to follow when playing chess. The one I remember is to keep your emotions in check. For me, that goes for both negative and positive emotions. When I blunder my queen, I need to keep a cool head and remember that in other games that I have played the opponent ended up making similar blunders, so all is not lost. I also need to slow down when I think I see an amazing fork or other tactic. So many times my presumed “forking piece” was easily captured by my opponent, or my capture of their queen was actually a trade of queens that I did not intend.

Soon it will be one year since I began taking chess pretty seriously. It’s a relief to feel that I have finally seen some progress, although the over-achiever in me wishes for much more. But it is a journey, not a destination.