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.
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