Category: losing

My Second OTB Tournament

Published by Dawn on November 13, 2024

In early November, I went to an ALTO (At Least Twenty-One) tournament at the Charlotte Chess Center! The experience lived up to the positive things I had heard about the event (The tournament winner, Nate Solon, has a great post about it.) It was wonderful to be in a silent room in which more than one hundred adults were concentrating over chess boards that had been set up for them in advance, with the clocks all programmed as well. All three of my opponents (I took two byes) were lovely people who were willing to discuss the game afterward. I lost all three, alas. I had really hoped that I would win just one game: the friend with whom I traveled did, and it was his first tournament. Still, I feel I handled the inevitably difficult emotions well and stayed focused on the positives.

Until the Saturday night social hour. An experience I had there was much more trying than losing all my games. A participant approached me, shook my hand vigorously, and while laughing thanked me for having the lowest rating of all of the participants, so that he didn’t have to be in that position.

Chess improvers: Be kind to one another. Because, as they say, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. We all navigate the adult-chess-improver world trying or pretending not to care about our ratings, which we are able to do to a lesser or greater extent depending on our psychological makeup and what is going on in our lives. But making fun of someone you don’t even know with a lower rating than you is not ok. Those of us who weren’t born in a barn know this, but my experience shows that it needs to be said. Now I feel even more self-conscious about my rating, which was 101 going into the tournament (my online ratings indicate that this number should be higher). It’s hard not to feel that I have to win a game at the next one. I’m also worried because I’m having trouble letting go of this jaw-dropping incident, and I know that that just hurts me, not the perpetrator. I’m going to try to make writing about it here the last time I talk about it or think about it.

Chess improvers: Be kind to one another. Because, as they say, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. As it happened, I was widowed about ten days before the tournament. It was not a sudden passing, and I decided to make the long-planned trip to Charlotte with a supportive friend, hoping that it would provide some diversion from my intense sadness. As it did, for the most part. Chess is so absorbing that, even while anticipating the loss of my husband, I had hoped that it would eventually be a safe harbor amid the tumultuous waves of grief. I even joked that when I remarried, it would be to chess. At this early stage I can say that sometimes it has been that safe harbor, but my emotions have been interfering with my play and study (with everything, actually) more than I would like. I’m persisting, though, because I know that this rewarding pastime and its largely supportive community will help see me through.

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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.

“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]

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.

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.