Category: chess psychology

Is My Brain Lazy?

Published by Dawn on May 14, 2024

Is calculation largely a matter of willpower, or mental discipline? This question haunts my attempts to improve at chess. I ask this when I am calculating and visualizing a sequence of moves. “I take X, he takes Y, I take Z,” I think, for example, and then it feels like a white curtain or gray fog has overtaken my brain and made further thinking impossible. But is it really impossible? When this happens I fear that I am just being lazy, that if I exerted enough willpower I would be able to calculate the sequence further. Of course, I am not talking about grandmaster-level calculation here, but during the recent Candidates Tournament I was surprised and relieved to hear GM David Howell say that he was glad he wasn’t the one who had to do the calculation involved in a position that had been reached. To me this seemed to imply that he at least feels extended calculation to be extremely onerous, although we know that he would likely be up to the task.

The only other experience I’ve had with that white curtain/gray fog feeling is when listening to speech in a foreign language that is at or just above my proficiency level in it. I will have been conversing adequately for a certain period of time, when suddenly a switch appears to go off and my brain just will not parse any more. I may catch some of the prominent words in the sentence, but a mental fogginess prohibits me from putting the pieces together any longer. The feeling is similar to what goes on when I am playing chess, except that with foreign languages it seems to be a matter of exhaustion after a period of successful communication. Certainly in chess I become mentally tired if a game goes on longer than I am used to, but this lazy brain syndrome can happen long before I have played enough chess to have brain-fatigue.

[Scroll down to the end of the post for a link to ChessGoals and a coupon code for 30% off their courses.]

In addition to playing games and analyzing them, lately I have been doing the lichess Puzzle Streak as a warm up. My coach and I do it together sometimes, too, and he makes me say out loud the string of moves necessary to solve the puzzle. One thing that has helped me a lot when we do them together is that, when I get to where I can’t think anymore, he just calmly tells me it’s ok, start over from the beginning. He urges me, when doing a puzzle on my own, not to make a move until I have figured out the whole sequence. I know he’s right, but that means calculating and visualizing, and (I whine), it’s so much easier just to make that first check and see where the pieces end up. When I do the latter, I inevitably get some puzzles wrong. But I do mostly know better than to just make a check in an actual game without at least calculating my opponent’s possible responses.

I usually walk my dog before starting the chess puzzles portion of my morning routine. Sometimes during the walk I actually think to myself, “Today, I will be careful when doing my puzzles and not move until I have made a thorough calculation.” And then when I sit down and face that first puzzle, I either don’t try to calculate beyond one move or do so half-heartedly when I see it requires more than a couple of moves and give up before completing the sequence. This seems to indicate that I can’t will myself to make this effort just by some casual self-talk. But if I have not already exhausted my mental resources, I think I should be able to focus better.

I’m also wondering how my idea of willpower relates to our success or failure to apply a blunder check, and I’m interested in CM Azel Chua’s theory that we need a different approach than “Checks, captures, threats,” partly because that requires too much brain power over the course of a long game. (Hear him talk about this and other fascinating chess topics on Ben Johnson’s Perpetual Chess podcast and on Chess Goals’ No Pawn Intended.) But those are topics for another day.

An Older Woman’s Chess Journey is a proud affiliate of ChessGoals–if you use the link here to purchase from them and enter “dawn” as the coupon code, you will receive 30% off their courses, and I will receive a commission. Purchasing via an affiliate link doesn’t cost you any extra, and I only recommend products and services I trust.

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.

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.

Chess and Feelings

Chess and Feelings

Published by Dawn on May 29, 2022

Early on I wrote enthusiastically in this blog about the many chess podcasts that are available. Chess podcasts perform multiple functions. They give you a way to be in contact with chess when you don’t feel like playing. Or when you want to play, but can’t because you’re driving or exercising, which are excellent times to listen to a podcast. Most important, studying chess can be lonely, especially during this pandemic, and listening to a podcast can ease that loneliness.

Recently I discovered a new chess podcast called Chessfeels, which quickly made it to the top of my list. There are so many reasons to love this one. The insightful way in which the co-hosts–clinical psychologist Julia Rios and chess teacher JJ Lang–identify themselves during the opening gives you a good idea of what they are trying to do and what makes this pod unique. JJ calls himself “a chess teacher and amateur feelings-haver,” while Julia is “a clinical psychologist and amateur checkmate finder.” The opening tells you more when Julia calls chess “the game we know and love,” and JJ pipes up, “and hate.” That really caught my attention, because I sometimes feel that the flip side of my love for chess is a kind of hate–hate that it is so hard and that terrible things can happen while I am playing, like blundering. But of course it is I rather than the game that has blundered, so hatred of the game readily metamorphoses into self-hate. Few chess books or podcasts delve into such feelings, however, misleading one to conclude that no one else shares them. Thanks to Chessfeels, we learn that someone clearly does. JJ and Julia are always trying to gain a deeper understanding of something related to the psychology of chess, and they lighten the difficult aspects of their discussions with lots of clever repartee, which is always amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny.

Take, for example, the podcast’s second episode, in which they tackle the subject of JJ’s “addiction to Blitz.” Blitz is a very fast form of chess in which each player is given three to five minutes to play. As in the case of its cousin, Bullet, in which each player is given less than three minutes to play, the popularity of Blitz increased a lot during the pandemic as online chess playing grew. Watching these rapid-fire versions of chess has also become a popular pastime: on Twitch, many famous and not-famous players who broadcast themselves playing Blitz and Bullet for hours have garnered thousands of followers and a great deal of money in subscription fees.

JJ’s addiction is to playing, not watching, Blitz. Julia is careful to preface her remarks by saying that they are not a substitute for professional advice (as she is legally required to do), but we and JJ benefit greatly from the psychological information she imparts. In this episode, she walks JJ through the entire inventory of questions used to help diagnose addiction, and we learn that addiction grows as the stimulus and reward grow closer together in time. That is why Blitz and Bullet can be addicting in a way that classical chess (which has time controls exceeding 30 minutes per person) cannot. Other issues that the pair tackles include obsession with ratings (episode 6), burnout (episode 7), and practical techniques that you can use to counter anxiety during a game (episode 3). All are worth a listen or even two.

This is not to say that other chess podcasts don’t discuss feelings. Some do, but such discussions aren’t their reason for being. On Perpetual Chess, Ben Johnson and Han Schut interviewed a person who said he did not want to be a chess improver, just a “sustainer,” which led to a fascinating discussion about whether that was really true, and if so, why. Podcaster Dr. Keven Scull (Chess Journeys) endeared himself to me from the beginning with frequent references to his frustration and bewilderment about his difficulty in improving. Fittingly, it was his interview of Julia that brought Chessfeels to my attention.

Recommendation of the Week: It is all too easy for the novice chess player to be attracted to and bewildered by the huge number of books about chess, a great many of which, because they are above her level, are not a good use of her time. Recently I found one that is just right, A Guide to Chess Improvement: The Best of Novice Nook, by Dan Heisman. The contents originated as chess newsletter columns, but they have been edited to work seamlessly in book form, and the chapters cover all of the topics crucial for beginners, such as “Thought Process,” “Time Management,” “Skills and Psychology,” and “Tactics and Safety.”

Chess and the Mind

Chess and the Mind

Published by Dawn on May 8, 2022

I wrote jauntily in my last post about losing all the games I played in my first tournament. But the fact is that absorbing day-to-day chess losses with good humor can be more of a challenge. Getting better about losing is as important a goal for me as getting better at winning.

When I began investigating the topic, I soon found that I was not alone in having difficulty coping with chess losses. Exploring the forums of chess.com and lichess.org, I found many novices who shared my distress when they lost and were plaintively appealing for help. Someone, somewhere, recommended that such people read the last chapter of Jeremy Silman’s The Amateur’s Mind: Turning Chess Misconceptions into Chess Mastery. This is one of the many books I had acquired in my beginner’s enthusiasm. But I had set it aside without reading when I saw it on Ben Johnson’s list of recommended chess books. He helpfully specifies what rating ranges will get the most out of which books, and he suggests The Amateur’s Mind for people with ratings of 1000-1300. I am firmly situated in the three-digit range and expect to remain there for the foreseeable future. But that chapter was cited in the course of my informal research, and it had the spot-on title of “Developing Mental Toughness,” so I took a look.

I don’t know exactly what I expected. But what I discovered were descriptions that, if you removed the chessboard diagrams and accompanying strings of move notation, could have come directly from a book describing the kind of negative thoughts that accompany depression. All too familiar phrases, including “the unfortunate spiral into the abyss,” “a negative, defeatist attitude,” and “a deep sense of hopelessness,” jumped off the page at this reader. Analyzing one game, Silman writes of a player: “All his thoughts smacked of defeatism because Black only concentrated on the negative qualities of his position,” a sentence that could easily have come from a case study of a despondent person surnamed Black.

While Silman’s diagnoses match descriptions of depression and its attendant distorted thoughts, his prescriptions (“tips”) are, for the most part, chess-specific. However, many correlate easily with cognitive therapy strategies such as identifying inaccurate or negative thinking and reframing it. His admonition not to give up by resigning is easily translatable to life as well.

These correlations between depression and thoughts about one’s chess performance are both alarming and inspiring. Alarming because one wonders whether depressed people or people with depressive tendencies should even play chess given these psychological dangers, and inspiring because it is yet one more way that chess can be a vehicle for improving one’s play in the game of life. I will explore both ideas in a future post.

Blundering

Blundering

Published by Dawn on April 23, 2022

The word “blunder,” which can be briefly defined as “a critically bad move,” is a term of art in chess. Everyone who plays chess is bound to blunder. One can derive some comfort from Wikipedia’s article on the subject, which documents fourteen games in which famous grandmasters blundered. But beginners blunder quite frequently and even repeat the same blunder–such as losing their queen–many times. A blunder often leads to a loss, which is unpleasant for most of us. And for Type A personalities and perfectionists, losing can be so painful that they try to avoid situations in which losing is likely or even just possible. Some people may even start playing chess and soon abandon it permanently because of this pain. But please don’t! If I can withstand it, you can, too.

How? First of all, I promise–and one purpose of this blog is to demonstrate this–that the joys of chess far outweigh the pain, even when a chess loss feels like a monumental failure (heck, even when you play consecutive games that feel that way). Below I list just a few of the counterbalancing factors.

♟ The sheer beauty of the pieces on the board, even on the computer screen.

♟ The curious and delightful vocabulary of the game, from the names of the openings (Nathan Rose has written two wonderful books about these) to the words used to describe techniques and tactics, like fianchetto.

♟ The enjoyment a beginner can experience in the act of playing, even though she also senses vaguely that the game has endless depths that are far beyond her ken. (The closest thing to this that I have experienced is learning a language like Japanese. Two syllabaries and thousands of characters?!? Yes, but every step of the challenging journey has its own rewards.)

♟ The wonderful camaraderie of the global chess community that you can tap into simply by listening to a chess podcast, viewing a chess video on YouTube, or getting involved with a community like the Casual Chess Cafe.

Resilience has become a buzzword, but it truly is a crucial life skill. Bearing up under the many early blunders and losses that a chess beginner encounters will strengthen your resilience. Chess game analysis has two additional categories of errors that are less severe than “blunder”: “mistakes” and “inaccuracies.” When you finish a game on a platform like lichess.org or chess.com, the software conveniently tallies your inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders (chess.com softens the blows somewhat by also listing your “good,” “excellent,” and “brilliant” moves). When I make them in life, inaccuracies and mistakes can be devastating to me. But when I look at a chess game analysis, it is the blunders that get the most of my attention and further study. I look at the mistakes and inaccuracies, but given their place in the scheme of things, I simply note them mentally and vow not to repeat them in the future. Chess is helping me bring this attitude to life situations as well.

Recommendation of the Week: Listen to Daniel Lona interview Jennifer Shahade on his podcast, the Chess Experience. They talk about Shahade’s important new book, Chess Queens, and all things women in chess.