Can your morals hurt your chess?

It's no secret that I don't play chess "just for fun".

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Sure, I'm an amateur, but hadn't I had a drive to improve my skills and avenge my losses, so to speak, I wouldn't have even done as much as I did. I've been playing live chess on a few online servers for about ten years now, and the most I've achieved as a self-taught guy with a really old offline Chess Mentor application (and a number of books and videos) is a rapid rating close to 2000 on a few other sites. Now I'm back to around 1800 and slowly falling further. (And no, it's not due to old age, I'm 25. xD)

In time, I figured that one of my main psychological weaknesses in chess was getting too emotional: simple yet subtle fears would rule my thinking habits and cloud my over-the-board judgement. Also, I never quite manage to get over the pain of chess losses. Yes, you do move on and hopefully get better, but it doesn't seem to hurt any less in the moment of perceived loss than it used to. Personally, I just learnt to control my reactions to pain, not to experience it at lesser levels. Still, that's kinda good, because the pain keeps you going, you always wanna come back and undo it... right?

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But what if you stop thinking that the pain's worth it?

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[TL;DR]

I don't know if there are other people who have similar perceptions of why they play chess, but I think that what drives me to play is a sneaky obsessive need for control and power, which might or might not be a typically male thing, but at one point recently I decided that my peace didn't have to depend on whether I'm good and/or improving at chess or not, so I was like "yeah, chess is too much pain for my pleasure, but if I can get rid of the discomfort which pushes me to play, I won't feel bad about not playing as well - I should treat the cause, not the symptoms!"

The problem is, old habits and schemes are a tough nut to crack, so I get chessthirsty every once in a while, but because I want peace instead of war and I don't have my mind set on being a proverbial monk of prey like I used to, I think I'm subconsciously sabotaging my results by having less will to use my skill to kill... so I end up hurting worse than before.

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It's like I'm trapped between wanting and not wanting chess, and I don't know what to do.

You can't kill plastic.

My emotional state definitely affects my chess ability. When I'm feeling confident I play significantly better than when I'm doubting my ability (ie after a few losses). Oddly enough deliberately making myself angry actually makes me better at bullet as I become quicker and more aggressive while still maintaining a similar level of general play.

Well, I genuinely have no idea what to do, I seem to be stuck in a transition... I don't mean to fully abstain from chess at all costs, it's just that improving through playing is the only thing fun about it, so if I keep getting worse, there's no fun in that. If I didn't use to be better than I am now, I'd have something to be excited about... but now I'm just wondering why my mind is becoming a jumbled mush, and I feel no closer to either answering that or getting my clarity back. What twisted part of me would like me to fail so badly? It's like I have a chess depression... a dechession.

Either way, your username's got to be the best I've ever seen. 😁

I tend to liken bullet chess to fighting games, although it's more about visual memory than muscle memory, so I guess anger wouldn't affect you negatively because of that. Anyhow, I suck at both bullet and the FGs.

Still unable to commit here.

Yes

Can chess hurt your morals?

"I like the moment when I break a man's ego." - Bobby Fischer

Hmmm... at least that's what I think hinders my playing ability.

Now, what shoud I do about said "morals"?

The way I see it, I can either:

a) accept that I hit my peak in this chess life and that I'm only gonna be worse from here on out, although it won't matter much that my skill's low if I don't actually play and get new losses to back it up further, or

b) get REALLY angry and determined to become a good player again, so I work obsessively for something that isn't guaranteed to truly satisfy me, only make the pain go away.

Again, both seem hard to do. I miss the player that I used to be.

In OTB tournament play, I was stuck at about the 1600-1700 level for more than a year. It seemed that I had plateaued and just couldn't shift gears to reach the next level.

What eventually snapped me out of it and sent me up to the 2000+ (OTB) level was a combination of two things:

1) I decided that I didn't care about my rating, or even about my results. I was just going to play for fun from now on.

2) I started teaching groups of 1200-1400 strength players. It seems that the need to break tactical and strategic concepts down into bite-sized pieces and organize them, in order to prepare the lessons for my students, was a bigger help to me than it was to them.

It's a conspiracy, I tell you!

I'll find out when (if) I get there!

getting too emotional is definitely for plonkers.

to be a great chess player, in fact to become world champion you need

(1) absolutely no regard for your opponent

(2) a bloodthirsty desire for revenge if you lose.

(3) the feeling that in this universe, only you matter.

That last one really does help... I've experienced the exact same thing a few months ago, when I was still teaching violin at a public music school. All the nuances that I used to constantly point out to some of the older students, all of them stuck with me during my own practising in that period, so I finally started developing my own inner voice instead of following someone else's.

Whether I can hope to achieve similar results based off of teaching others the basics of chess, that remains to be seen... When I see the board yet I see nothing, it's scary.

Best thing is to play for fun, and not worry about the grade or anything else. Play when you want to, stop when you want to. You are over-thinking. Just don't try to play while you are driving or riding a bicycle or jet-ski. Or skiing, or going on a date. Playing chess while scubadiving is okay, but it had better be blitz, and the pieces had better be heavy. I wonder whether anybody sells under-water chess clocks. 

Not too much, I'd wager... the only thing I seem to share with my partial namesake is my Slavic origin, and while that does seem like it should give me a boost in drinking endurance, I don't think it really does. A relatively petite guy who doesn't like alcohol much to begin with, that doesn't seem like a good start...

I might start dabbling in trying some craft beers out, though.

Hopefully I won't get as obsessed about that as I am about chess.

budvar Budweiser , a Czech beer , and when chilled it is the best lager in the world ,

today an opponent made a mouse slip in a team match which hung his queen for no compensation , this can happen to any of us , after a bit of thought I let morality win the decision and offered a draw , I await his acceptance

I always play a few games online on major holidays. Some family members forbid the behavior, but I wake up earlier than they do.

http://muslimheritage.com/article/ziryab

Thanks for posting that video Rocky! So I am not the first person to go looking for an underwater chess clock after all :-). I do hope that this is helpful to the original poster.