Chess Nightmares From A-Z

Introduction

Recently, I learned something about chess (not to brag, of course) — that it can sometimes be truly fun and rewarding. This notion began to corrupt my mind after my friends dragged me out of retirement to an OTB blitz tournament. Despite being rusty and forgetting all my precious opening prep, I had a great time and even beat some nerds who'd been studying chess while I was doing more important things, thus maintaining my status as the sigma /j.

To avoid the horrifying possibility that getting back into chess could be enjoyable, I wrote this blog about terrible chess experiences, listed from A-Z. My hope was that it would remind me of all the downsides of being a chess player, and extinguish any lingering desire to push wood. Read on until the end to see if I was successful in repelling my own enthusiasm.

Anyway, the letter A stands for:

Accidental Stalemate

The accidental stalemate is chess' most iconic hazing ritual. It occurs when you accidentally stalemate your opponent, usually in a completely winning position. Even with a 20-point material advantage, victory is never guaranteed. To illustrate, I dug up one of my first ever online games, back when I was (somehow) even worse at chess than I am now.

After retrieving this game, I clicked on my opponent's profile and was shocked to find that after all these long years and thousands of games, he is still 700 rated. Thus he earned the title of Plateau Final Boss, though I assume he's just a chill guy who doesn't care about improving and only wants to have fun. In that regard I aspire to be like him (more on that in my next blog).

I digress. For many beginners, like me a couple years ago, the accidental stalemate is a canon event. The soul-crushing regret of squandering rating points drove me to practice proper endgame technique. To prove to you guys and myself that I've overcome my blunderous ways, I replayed the initial position from the previous diagram against Stockfish:

Avoiding stalemate is hard enough by itself, but when this display of endgame technique arrives at the end of a long game, time pressure can set in, ramping up the difficulty of conversion. If this is a recurring issue for you, consider playing timed endgames with a computer or training partner. Set a position similar to the above, set a clock with 10 seconds for the winning side, and see if you can avoid stalemate and win before the flag.

Here are my tips to avoid time pressure and accidental stalemates:

• Learn the overkill mates. Learn the King+Queen and King+Rook mates and practice them until you can win in your sleep.
• Keep giving checks. You can't stalemate your opponent if they are in check.
• Leave your opponent with a couple pawns. Even if the enemy king has no moves left, there are still pawn moves, so no stalemates.
• Manage your time. Most mistakes come from time scrambles. I like to leave 30-40% of my time for the endgame.
• Check for stalemates. Manually double-check after every single move in every single game that the enemy king isn't in stalemate, and with experience it'll become a subconscious process.

Bongcloud Humiliation

I remember eagerly playing my last game to a huge rating milestone a few years ago. As the game progressed, my cautious optimism quickly turned to confusion and then panic. I stared at the board, vaguely rendering the state of the position in my mind, wondering how I had achieved no advantage twenty moves after facing 1.f3. I could almost hear my gremlin opponent cackling behind his screen, moving each piece with his cheeto-stained fingers until I finally realized I was going to lose – both the game and my self-esteem.

There are few things more humiliating in chess than being destroyed by an opponent playing a troll opening like the Bongcloud. Losing to these players makes me reflect on all the time I've spent studying opening theory and if it was truly worth it. Is there any point to remembering an 18-move Polerio line if I can't even beat 2.Ke2?. Even worse than that is losing to a garbage opening like the Caro-Kann. 

Meme openings have been used not only by gremlins like my opponent, but also super GMs and World Champions to get into their opponents' heads. The most (in)famous example of this was Magnus Carlsen's win over Wesley So in a speed chess tournament back in 2020. As if casually crushing elite chess players wasn't enough, Carlsen had to do it after opening with 1.f3 and 2.Kf2.

It’s hard to forget the game when someone plays f3 and Kf2 and just crushes you. That’s so humiliating.

-Wesley So

Just in case you ever get the chance to play Magnus, here's my advice to punish unprincipled opening play like the Bongcloud: Smash open the center. Your opponent, who's been slacking off with his development and king safety, will probably be completely unprepared to defend against aggression. Assuming you've been playing well, your centralized pieces will coordinate a great king hunt. Here's a great video on when to open up the center if you're interested. Make sure to stay calm and not let emotions control your chess moves.

Computer Analysis Cruelty

The rise of chess computers has been both a boon and a curse. Perhaps the most grievous blow to the chess world by their growing strength has been the tarnishing of brilliancies with cold punctuational objectivity. Chessic creativity of all sorts, from Mikhail Tal's daring sacrifices to a beginner's misguided self-immolations, is being squashed by the revolution of evaluations, centipawns, and other silicon sorcery.

Below is one of Tal's iconic sacrifices. In return for his queen, he gets a knight, majestic piece coordination, and a strong attack. Many people describe it as his most beautiful move ever, yet Stockfish can't appreciate the aesthetics of the sacrifice or the practical advantage it gives. The evaluation plummets from about -0.4 to +2, a dramatic enough swing to warrant two red question marks. Luckily for Tal, he wasn't burdened with Chess.com Game Review symbols and went on to win this game anyway against a strong master.

There are two types of sacrifices: correct ones and yours.

-Stockfish, probably

Not long after I learned chess, I studied games of Tal as well as other great attackers – Morphy, Alekhine, Kasparov, etc. I admired their playing style and tried to emulate it. To do so, I played risky gambits and went for every king hunt in the hopes that one day I'd play a brilliancy too. And one day, I thought that day had come.

In the following game I was brimming with confidence after a Smith-Morra success leading to a commanding middlegame position. But I didn't want to just win the game. Anybody can win a game. Winning is for losers. Instead I searched for some type of sacrifice to leave the chess world in awe. I imagined future generations of nerds poring over my game, used as an exemplar in a book about attacking, as I decided to sacrifice the 'ROOOOOOOK'.  

While playing a beautiful move and being rewarded with a ?! is frustrating, even more frustrating to me is seeing others taking these evaluations as gospel. Reducing the art of chess analysis to an exercise in numeracy is leaving rating gains on the table. There's a better way to go about it if your goal is improvement.

A good approach is to start with detailed self-analysis before running any engines. Write down what you were thinking during the game, then 'check your answers' against proper play. That way, you can use the computer to unearth errors in your thought process instead of just being spoon-fed your mistakes. You can even replace the computer entirely and analyze with a coach, if you have one, or a strong player, if you can find anyone unemployed enough to help you out. They can differentiate between mistakes that are too difficult to interpret and mistakes you should learn something from.

Draw Decline Regret

We've all been there: confidently declining a draw offer, intent on pushing for the win. A few moves later, our position starts to crumble until we eventually lose the game. Afterwards, we regret not going for the draw. But it takes courage to refuse to shake hands and play on, especially against a higher-rated player. It's the fearless mentality of super GMs like Gukesh Dommaraju, who could've split the point in his game against GM Abdusattorov in the 2022 Olympiad but sought a win for his country. Though it ultimately didn't come, his fighting spirit has taken him far in the chess world and today he is the World Champion.

Though Uzbekistan won the 2022 Olympiad, Gukesh stood out individually. He won the Top Board Prize with a score of 9/11, and beat Sargissian, Shirov, and Caruana, proving to be one of the brightest young talents in chess. Two years later, he led the Indian team again at the 2024 Olympiad, somehow improving on his 2022 accomplishments with a 9/10 score and a record-breaking 3056 performance rating, as India won Gold.

A positive "win at all costs" attitude will add at least 150 rating points to your stats!

-Jeremy Silman

The lesson from all this? Never accept draw offers if you think you could win. If you're someone who would usually decline draws but completely fold at the sight of a higher-rated player, you could try not looking at your opponent's rating after the game. After doing this at a couple tournaments, I was shocked at the comically high ratings of players I easily beat, reducing my fear of large numbers a little bit.

Exchange French

For a few months, before I was enraptured by the virtues of 1...e5, I played the French Defense religiously. It was great fun! I loved the strategical battles of the Advance, the chaotic slugfests of the Winawer, the quiet tension of the Tarrasch. But some people wake up in the morning and decide to deprive themselves and their chess opponents of all sorts of fun. These people play the Exchange French.

Of course, there are no boring openings, just boring players. It's just a striking coincidence that many Exchange French players are indeed boring people who are oddly content with having a 0.00 soulless, symmetrical position at the start of the middlegame. And despite some well-meant advice ("You see the Exchange every other game? Just abort every other game then") I continued to bang my head against a wall whenever I saw that pawn capture.

That was until I discovered this Exchange French line for Black which breaks the symmetry early on, is genuinely interesting, and very sound:

Note that both the line and the annotations are shamelessly stolen from Anish Giri's French Defense course on Chessable. For the record, this isn't a paid promotion (though, Anish, if you're reading this... it could be ).

Forgetting Theory

As a big nerd who loves opening theory, this was the nightmare that truly kept me up at night. Unfortunately, thanks to my excessively long break from chess, it's become my reality. Countless hours spent poring over Ruy Lopez lines feel like they've gone to waste as the knowledge has been banished from by brain. Relying on chess skills rather than memorized variations seemed like a dystopian hellscape to me a few months ago, but my hand has been forced, at least until I get back to the Chessable grind.

The plight of opening amnesia affects not only knobs like me but also Grandmasters and even legendary World Champions like Garry Kasparov. In the below game, Garry plays the Queen's Gambit Accepted but forgets his theory and a falls victim to a very common thematic idea.

If you play the Queen's Gambit, make sure you're aware of this Qb3 battery idea, which is very common in 3.e3 e5 QGA lines. In the above position, up to 35% of players play the error 6...Nf6??. If Kasparov himself walked into it, just imagine all the points you can pick up against amateurs!

As for the issue of forgetting opening lines, my recommendation is to use some type of opening training software. Here are a few options:

• ChessTempo: They have an Opening Training feature. While I love Chesstempo for their tactics, their opening training software is basic and has few features. I wouldn't recommend it unless you want something very simple.
• Chessable: Allows you to create your own repertoire and add/import variations. I like Chessable's spaced repetition system. Their interface is good too, especiallly if you like to annotate your lines. Chessable also has many opening courses made by strong players that you can access for free.
• Chessbook: Unlike Chessable, Chessbook is built around you creating your own repertoire. The main selling point is that Chessbook uses a database to ensure you only memorize variations you'll see in real games. The downside is that you have to do all the work yourself. If you've never used Chessbook before, definitely give it a try.

As I wrote in my previous openings blog, make sure that you aren't just blindly memorizing lines!

Game Over? Guess Again

The uncanny feeling of delivering checkmate but not hearing the Game Over sound effect strikes fear into the hearts of every chess player. For a brief moment we celebrate our win, but the lingering silence dampens our joy. Suddenly, panic sets in, and the frantic search begins for a random bishop leering at our mating piece from a parallel universe away. Why? Why is the game not ending?

Jokes and ludicrously long diagonals aside, the problem of overlooking faraway enemy pieces comes down to weak board vision. If you're a beginner struggling to spot sniper bishops, try playing slow games and following a checklist-like thought process. This could involve checking for changes in the position after each move and scanning the whole board for checks, captures and threats.

Puzzles are another good way to improve your board vision. You should be solving each puzzle within a few seconds to develop quick pattern recognition. Features like Puzzle Rush help with this. One of my favorite puzzle sets to recommend to beginners is this free course. I like it because it introduces each tactical theme one by one and the puzzles are well-selected. The course can be replayed à la Woodpecker until you can eventually complete everything in 30 minutes or less. The first two chapters have puzzles about spotting hanging pieces, perfect for improving board vision. 

Ultimately the most important factor in strengthening board vision is experience. After a few years of chess, I've very nearly stopped outright hanging pieces in my Rapid games; these days I usually hang tactics instead! So just stay consistent and improvement will come. 

Hindsight Horror

Have you ever played a move and instantly wondered... "why on Earth did I play that move?"

I have. Way too many times. In the below game, I blitzed out an innocent king move. The instant after I released the piece, the magnitude of my error dawned on me. My teeth chattering with fear, I prayed to the chess Gods that my opponent, who was 200 rating points higher than me, would somehow miss a simple checkmate. Spoiler alert: he did not.

Before playing a move, I'm looking for reasons to play it, whereas after playing a move I'm looking for ways my opponent can counter it. 43...Kg5 is a great move because it places my king on an active square where it can help support pawn advances like ...h4 and ...f4. But after I actually played it, I recognized some downsides, like the fact it loses me the game immediately.

Part of the problem is visualization; imagining what the board would look like after a move is much harder than actually seeing the board after the move is played. One way to get past this is to hover pieces over the square you want to move them to, but that's kind of cheating. So I think the best way to fight hindsight horror is to train visualization.

These blind tactics force you to calculate a certain number of moves ahead to find the puzzle solution from the resulting position. Unfortunately, the puzzles are all very easy and there's no way to change the difficulty, just the depth. Still, I plan to continue practicing visualization this way until the day comes that I play a move and think to myself, "Wow, that was such a good move." (I'll be practicing for a while...)

Conclusion

I'm sure you guys were all eagerly awaiting the verdict as to whether I'm returning to chess or not. Well, I'm ashamed to admit that I've already relapsed and played a few games, and I do plan to continue for the foreseeable future. Writing this blog certainly didn't help in my mission of abstinence – if anything, it made me want to get back into chess (and blogging) even more.

In the unlikely event that I finish writing parts two and three of this series, I might try making another ‘A-Z’ style blog, though I’ll have to postpone it until I think of a better idea than ‘Chess Files From A-H’. If you have any suggestions, please drop them in the comments, as my own strikes of inspiration are few and far between. Also, if you guys have experienced any of these nightmares, share your stories down below. As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next blog.