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.
Be First to Comment