Does Chess Have To Torment Us?

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.