LeGrande's Lectern
*Note: The Featured Game of the Week, which saw The Skittles Room’s Danen Downs lose with the white pieces against the crafty Argentinean, Mauro Huber, was the inspiration for today’s column.
Friends you are in luck, for I am an expert at losing chess games! Openings confound me. Often I blunder and lose a piece, or concede crucial territory within my first ten moves. In those rare moments when I find myself with a won game, I all too often fail to discover the winning plan and squander away the victory.
On any given day I am certain to lose at least one game, and sometimes I lose them all. Sometimes to six-year olds! And still I can’t wait to reset those pieces and play again. Is there something wrong with me? As Dr. Phil likes to assert in these situations, “What’s the payoff here?” There has to be a reason I keep repeating this (losing) behavior.
Is it really possible that the reason I continue to lose is because I actually enjoy losing more than winning?
Dr. Phil aside, the essence of the question is a valid one: How do I put up with these continual losses without losing all interest in chess? What pleasure, if any, can be derived from losing?
Cont'd....
Let’s face it, people, losing stinks. We’ve all had the urge to quit the game forever after squandering a positional advantage, or worse, a won position. These losses do more than leave a bad taste in your mouth, and that’s no joke. Scientific studies consistently confirm that losing has a significant physiological response on the brain and body:
After the initial MRI and video-clip viewing, Davis conducted a short therapy session with the subjects and had them watch the clip a second time. The pre-motor cortex became more active after the therapy session, which could indicate that talking about a loss helps athletes recover. Chris Carr, a sports psychologist at St. Vincent’s Sports Medicine Center in Indianapolis, took the research as a sign that athletes can change how they manage emotions in response to a loss.
“How do you really assess your best performance?” Carr said. “Sometimes you put your best performance out there, and you know in your heart that you gave it everything you had, and you still lost. So you feel bad, but then sometimes you can recover and learn all the positive things and that generates the emotion that will keep you training harder, getting the little things right, and increasing the chance for success the next time you compete.”
In fact, [the] ability to build on experience is one of the defining traits of successful athletes. They are particularly good at working through adversity and turning defeat into a positive learning tool…* [all italics mine]
Cont'd....
And so herein lies the secret as to why I still have not yet had my enthusiasm for chess squelched by my more-than-routine failures at the chessboard:
Unofficially – by which I mean “according to the opinion of several highly rated players (1700-2100) who have beaten me” - I have seen my rating increase nearly 400-500 points in the past six months since I started taking notation and annotating my losses! Although I have yet to put this claim to the test in a rated tournament, that day is approaching rapidly enough (check back for details)! So there is no need to rush it. Besides, I find it best to keep the pleasure of losing separate from rated play. For this reason, I follow two rules that grant me the utmost confidence that my losses will always make me stronger, and that my victories will always be worth cherishing:
1. When not playing in a tournament I make a concerted effort to play games against players rated several hundred points above myself. This way I know that I am more likely to pick up good habits when I study my opponent’s moves afterwards. Also, whenever possible, I play with someone who is willing to perform a “post-mortem” on our game, telling me where he (or she!) thought I made mistakes and how she devised a plan to take advantage of them.
2. When I play in a rated tournament I do my very best (always going for the full point!) no matter if my opponent is rated lower, or higher, than myself.
Hopefully this inspires you to begin annotating your losses like I did in our Featured Game of the Week! Rest assured, I have no illusions about my powers of analysis when it comes to chess, and I post my annotations merely to encourage those of you who have no idea how to begin doing so for yourself. Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know! Put your best foot forward and find out how rewarding it is to study your own losses.
For those in a critical mood (hopefully you are!), please correct and comment on the accuracy of my analysis. I am excited to find evidence of sharp minds and wits among our readership.
Till next time,
“LeGrande”