Category: resilience

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.

 

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.