Uncontrollable Addiction | April 5th, 2025
You know you really need to stop playing chess when you do something idiotic like this.
This was my seventh game of the day. I proceeded to play 24 more blitz games throughout the day. I probably developed a gambling addiction, albeit gambling is strictly prohibited here. If gambling is banned by the government, blitz chess is a nice alternative.
Let’s wrap things up, it was a pretty wild day. drumrolls please…
31 games, 14 wins, 2 draws, 15 losses. We started at 2001 and finished at 2008, gaining a total of seven elo. I’m surprised I even got a positive net after all of this, although I could’ve prevented playing an additional twenty-ish games by just stopping at the right time, although with my boredom on top of the roof, it was a bit difficult.
Three days ago (well, two days technically, as I wrote the blog for April 2nd on April 3rd), I compared playing blitz chess for elo with going to the casino. This stands forever true. I started the day putting four tokens in the slot machine and won all four of them, one of them against an International Master.
And then I put four more tokens for four more plays, and proceeds to lose all four of them.
Unwilling to go home after those embarassing defeats, I put four more tokens in the slot machine. This time, I won all four of them again.
This type of zigzag progression literally only happens in blitz chess. 2035 would be the peak I will see for today, and I will soon regret pushing for 2050. Because literally right after the chess gods in the sky gave me a second chance at cashing out, I proceed to win only one of my next seven games.
After some boomerangs here and there with my highest peak after that tilt being 2032, I choked back to 2008 and decided to call it quits, at the very least having a positive net.
So why am I describing my chess elo progression for today, did I ran out of things to talk about? Quite the opposite actually, I can probably talk about how drunk I was in some of my losses, playing absolutely idiotically, I can also talk about how I beat an International Master first game of the day. But there is one thing I really want to take note here, taking aside from chess, and something I will probably reiterate again and again in the future blogs, as my advices are as valuable to me as New Year’s resolutions:
Self-control is important.
I can’t necessarily recall what chess blog it is, but the author basically shared the best way to play online chess. Nine games a day, period. Nine games is the amount of games you will mostly see in a tournament, it is the perfect amount before overdosing, and focusing on that period of time before playing will not only help you practice self-control and not overplaying, causing negative emotions, but it will also help you better prepare your tournaments.
Although does it look like I’m following this rule? No. So do you, come on, you probably never knew this advice until I shared it. Had I played four games, I would’ve stopped at 2035, my highest peak, then I can celebrate how my chess is accelerating faster than a Tesla Cybertruck. Had I played nine games, I would’ve gotten a standard 5/9, but at least I would’ve finished at 2012, which is more than how much I ended with.
So yeah, that’s for the entire day. No annotations, showcase of games or anything, partially because I’m exhausted as hell. I debated on playing more, but it was 10pm, and one of my friends said this in the Chess.com Discord Server:
Come on, my advices don’t even mean much to me.
Alright that’s it. I was writing this while eating some ice cream by the way. If you’re having a bad day, grab some, it aids your mood by a lot =)
