Category: General

It has been quite a while since I posted, but my chess life has gone on as usual (aka I play, I analyze, I take lessons, I feel I am a better player, I don’t achieve the rating of a better player). I did realize a longtime chess dream in August: I traveled to the World Chess Hall of Fame and Galleries in St. Louis! I had wanted to go since the first time I watched a chess tournament broadcast from there several years ago, when I first got into chess, and I was able to convince a friend who has just dipped her toes into the chess waters to accompany me. If I had to choose a highlight, it was playing chess outside right in front of the museum, by the world’s largest chess piece.  A Starbucks is conveniently located right there, so we were able to nurse a cold beverage while playing outside in August in St. Louis. 

There are two buildings, one housing the galleries and shop, and the other housing the St. Louis Chess Club. We enjoyed a wonderful curator tour of the exhibit that was showing at the time, on chess variants. After that we made the first of two expeditions to the shop, where I bought a couple of nice portable chess set cases and also notebooks and pens for the members of my women’s chess group, which delighted them. 

Next, it was across the street to The Club. There was a tournament going on, so I had hoped to be able to watch in a classroom there with commentary by their grandmaster in residence, as is always advertised during the breaks when you watch their tournaments on YouTube. Of course I had also hoped to catch a glimpse of one of the greats during the breaks. Alas, the tournament venue was being renovated, so the action was in some other part of the city. I was tempted to head over there, but I was told that it wouldn’t be set up for spectators. But that’s okay; the renovations are now done, and I want to go back sometime anyway. 

Also this summer I took a look at two new courses that ChessGoals has developed. I purchased one, and they provided me with the other as a review copy. Each costs only $9. They aren’t chess courses in the traditional sense, as in helping you to master opening theory, endgame technique, or strategy. Rather, they are about how best to study chess. One is How to Study Chess Effectively with Limited Time (“Study chess smarter with just 20 minutes a day”), and the other is Chess Habits That Stick (“Build consistency and motivation that lasts”). I applaud ChessGoals for producing this kind of content, which I think many of us need, whether we realize it or not. Each course has one hour of video lessons as well as PDFs and quizzes. The quizzes help reinforce your learning, and the PDFs are super helpful because they contain the structured forms ChessGoals has already devised for you to record all the data necessary to help you study effectively and create habits that stick. I have created various tracking spreadsheets myself, but never stick to them, but I know that studies have shown that if we pay for something we tend to be more invested in using it, so you are getting accountability for your $9.

Many of us spend the majority of our chess time studying alone and playing strangers online, with few or no opportunities to talk to someone about chess, including how we should be approaching it for the best results. Watching these videos with NM Matt Jensen’s calm, clear instructions felt like finally finding the right person with whom to have this conversation–for just a little more than the price of a latte.

[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.]

I think we all need to get better at losing chess games, starting at the top and going all the way down to lowly me. It won’t be news to most people reading this that Magnus Carlsen pounded the table hard enough for pieces to topple over when he lost to World Champion Gukesh during the Norway Chess tournament. What interested me were the reactions of two of the commentators, IM and WGM Tania Sachdev and IM and WGM Jovanka Houska. I’m paraphrasing rather than going back to the video for exact quotes, but Sachdev said something about chess being a brutally emotional game, which she implied made his reaction understandable. Houska, on the other hand, said that such behavior was unacceptable, full stop. What do you think? 

I have a lot of thoughts about this. First, it’s a shame that our pastime rarely gets in the news unless there is cheating or violence, which are very rare, statistically speaking. Brawls at Major League Baseball games tend to grab headlines, but a player throwing his helmet or batting gloves does not. 

Chess does feel to me like a game that is brutal on the emotions. Not letting it be so is a chess goal of mine that is as important to me as raising my rating. The reasons that losing at chess packs such a punch are cited frequently. It is an individual sport in which both players have almost total equality, the sole exception being that the person playing with the white pieces derives a minimal advantage. Moreover, a loss cannot be attributed to or shared with a teammate, except in the case of rare team chess tournaments. Improving in chess is difficult and time-consuming, and since most of us have a winning percentage that is just a little higher than 50 percent, only rarely does it feel that all those hours of study and practice have paid off. 

And then there is the rating issue. After every game you play, unless it is casual over-the-board or you find someone to play an unrated game online, your rating either goes up or down. So it feels like you are constantly being graded, and the hope of gaining back lost rating points can easily lead to playing binges and tilt. Yes, a baseball player’s batting average is similarly affected by every at-bat, but the player can’t play extra games to get extra at-bats on demand, with the hope of adding points back to his average. Hitting a baseball is really hard, too: if a player gets one hit in three times at bat, his batting average will be almost as good as it gets. In the course of his career, Ted Williams got a hit “only” 34.4 percent of the time. We chess players are lucky that we may win around 50 percent of the time.

One sad indicator of chess’s brutality on the emotions is that one regularly sees on social media or hears from fellow players that someone is quitting the sport altogether because of this. I started playing chess several years ago, and after some flailing around, I found a coach who emphasizes mastering the emotional side of the game right along with all of the on-the-board skills. Just as I feel my chess has improved despite my plateau, I am certain that my emotional approach to the game is also better than it was at first. I see fewer ghosts, and I try not to make assumptions about a given game’s outcome at any point. The rare times that I feel confident can be just as detrimental to my play as feeling utterly lost due to a minor blunder. 

Some losses can still feel brutal, but these are much rarer for me than they were at the outset. I’m hopeful that my emotional game will continue to improve, and I have learned that one important way to assure this is to make a mental note during the game of how I felt when I made a move, especially a decisive one. I’m also beginning to read books that discuss this aspect of the game, such as the Seven Deadly Sins of Chess, which I plan to write about here in the future.

Yes, chess can be brutal on the emotions, but let’s not use this fact to excuse unacceptable behavior or to quit chess entirely. Looking inside can only help our game–and even our attitude toward life’s other inevitable setbacks.  

[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.]

Top photo by Alexas_Fotos on Unsplash

 

An adults-only chess tournament was held in Columbus, Ohio, last month. Such events are few and far between, so my friend John and I decided to go. It was certainly a lot closer to where we live, in Michigan, than is the Charlotte Chess Center, where we attended a tournament last November.

Studying the list of twenty entrants beforehand, I saw that I was once again at the bottom, and the next strongest player, was rated considerably above me. Not only that, during casual between-rounds conversation, someone from his chess club pronounced him underrated. I had hoped that I might gain my first tournament win this time around, but I knew it would be a long shot, and sure enough I am still without a tournament win. But the three-game day was a very nice experience, and I was able to enjoy it more than I had my previous two tournaments. One reason, I think, is that I now felt very comfortable writing down my moves and hitting the clock. Moreover, the event was held in a public library meeting room, with a Sweetwaters coffee shop just a few yards away, so there was no worry about going hungry or having insufficient caffeine. Also, perhaps because of the small number of participants, people were very friendly, and I was able to have nice conversations with several of them between rounds. One was David Marks, who gave John and me helpful information about how we might start a club and host a tournament. Coincidentally, David was interviewed by Kevin Scull on the Chess Journeys podcast shortly after the tournament. 

Based on the list of entrants and the tournament’s small size, I had a feeling that I would be the only woman present. At my first tournament, which had included many children, I felt very self-conscious about my gender, my age, and my chess ability. Would the kids who played me think I looked like their crazy grandmother? At my second, adults-only tournament, I  wasn’t distracted by such thoughts. I just wanted to count how many women there were. I wasn’t able to get a precise number, but it appeared to be between 10 and 15 percent. 

In Columbus, I had a new feeling–that I was proud to be the only woman playing chess there, which felt almost as good as a win. The organizer, Jeff Shen, told me that he is working to bring more girls and women into the game. According to Jennifer Shahade’s essential book Chess Queens, between 2010 and 2020, female participation in US chess was between 11 and 14 percent, an increase over the 8 percent logged in 2000. In the best case scenario, there would have been one additional woman at the Columbus tournament. I do wish I could have scored at least one win, to demonstrate that women can not only play chess, but play well. Fortunately, my opponents and my teacher, reviewing the games, told me that I had played competitively. I am glad I was there and that I can now sit down at the board with a tournament opponent and attend to the business at hand without as much mental baggage about my gender as I had at first. Presumably my chess will improve with those extra brain cells at work. 

[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.]

In his aptly titled book Perpetual Chess Improvement, Ben Johnson designated “community” as the fourth pillar of chess improvement (the first three being playing serious games, analyzing your games, and practicing tactics). But it can be difficult to find or build that needed chess community. It is easy to find strangers with whom to play online, and there are plenty of coaches who will work with you virtually. But those one-on-one interactions don’t constitute community.

In retrospect, I think that I was seeking community, in a sense, when I started this blog. I had many things to say about my chess journey and many questions to ask, but no place to direct them. 

I was thrilled when I learned that there was a chess club meeting weekly in the town right next to mine. My community! But did I rush out to join at the first opportunity? No, I chose instead to torment myself with anxieties about it. What if I’m the poorest player there? I had no shortage of other excuses: it’s in the evening, whereas I’m a lark who is starting to wind down when the club is ramping up. No one will want to play with me, and those who do will try Scholar’s Mate and other traps, checkmating me in under ten moves. 

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

At the same time that I was contemplating attending the chess club, people were encouraging me to go to a tournament. Actually I have wanted to sample the atmosphere of a large chess gathering like that ever since my first viewing of The Queen’s Gambit, but until today all I had done was look through the multitude of tournament announcements and come up with reasons why each tournament isn’t right for me. The time control is too short, the venue is inconvenient, it’s on a holiday weekend when roads will be crowded, etc, etc. 

Eventually, two things galvanized me into getting out to the chess club. One was the realization that, if I was being this hesitant about going to a casual club meeting, I would never get myself to a tournament. The other was that I have had a dream of starting a chess club for girls and women in my town, and it was time to realize it. It would make sense to do some networking at the other club first. So I went! The networking was successful–having met the club leader that evening, it was easy to email him afterward and ask if I could publicize my women’s group on his club’s Facebook page. And even though I was anxious and overwhelmed that first night, I felt at home amid all the chess talk. Many members were full of tales of their recent trip to the Chicago Open and the cheater who had been caught there. 

My second trip to the club was even better than the first, not least because the ice had been broken. I had heard that it would be a real joy (not to mention instructive) to play over the board and do an in-person post-mortem of the game with your opponent, and it was great to finally experience that. In the meantime, I had held the first meeting of my women and girls group, in a room reserved at the local public library. We had five at our first meeting, including a seven-year-old girl and her mother. It was marvelous to think that I might be helping to convey the joy of chess to a young girl. 

These first small steps toward building community around my chess somehow gave me the push I needed to register for a tournament, finally. I will be attending the Chicago Class Open later this month. Expect a debrief in my next post 🙂

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.

 

 

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. 

 

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.