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.