Handling Losses and Feeling "Not Good Enough"

Precisely. If you want to play them unrated, that works too. I'll bet that you'll find that when you're able to maintain material, you'll sometimes be able to take their pieces for free, and then you're ahead in material. And when you have more pieces, you win more. Don't count out the possibility of winning these sometimes.

30/0 games killed what little Chess ability I had.  One thing that has been helping me is that I stopped playing 30 minute games and I play the computer on easy and on medium every now and then.

I'm not very happy with my progress, but I did beat the computer on medium the other night.  I can't move fast.  I'm beginning to think it's a form of laziness, not taking my time, not checking the whole board to make sure a move is safe, not calculating sucessive moves enough.

I'm in the same boat and it's hard to play good and have fun when my head's messed up like this. 

really? do you even play in real life tournaments? do you have a fide or uscf rating? I don't know, but just futzing around on the internet, playing some blitz/bullet... I don't understand why you would be having such emotions. really strange. I guess I might understand if you were talking about real life real tournament games and your fide or uscf rating.

just doesn't make sense in the context of your chess.com rating, in the context of internet blitz/bullet. you are an enthusiast, a hobby player no?like 99 percent of everyone else on here? there's nothing wrong with that, playing chess on the internet for fun. in fact I fully support it. 

Nope, I don't play any serious tournaments... though I have thought that it might be interesting to, sometime. 

This happened to me too. Still does every now and then.

What's worked before that I can actually identify as directly responsible for increasing my strength and rating from where it was before?

Overdosing on tactics trainer.

Seriously.

One day,while I had a day off from working, I pretended like my full time job was chess player. I actually told myself I was going in to work that day.

And I did nothing but tactics trainer.

For 8 hours.

I took a break after each 100 problems.

I didn't understand all of them, but the important thing I told myself was I was exposing my memory and the subsconscious patterns stored in my mind's eye to use later.

I would make a challenge and tell myself to try not to quit until after the next 100 problems or the next 50 or next 200, depending on where I was.

And I kept track of how many I had done in total so far.

(I imagined there were people who used to beat me before who were sitting down watching television at their house while I was storing tactical weapons in my memory banks they wouldn't see coming next time we played until it was too late to do anything about it. Firm believer in the last laugh.)

After I got 1000 done, I noticed,

including short breaks, it had been 8 hours since I started that morning.

No kidding, when I went to play some 3 minute blitz chess, it seemed like all these new possibilities were there and I was trouncing opponents that were at my level.

And...

My blitz rating shot up from around 900-1000 to 1200-1300!

It wasn't a miracle, but by God, it sure felt like it.

(It's like a 3rd eye inside your mind opens up and you have this new extra tactical sense as an unfair advantage over your competition or something. Wild stuff!)

Who knows, it may not work for anyone else and maybe I just got lucky.

But,

I can't help but feel there may be a connection between what I experienced and all the people who are rated much higher than me who say players under 1800 or so should study tactics, tactics, tactics.

It was rare for me that I had that time to put into it that day, because extra time is hard to produce with my usual schedule and routine.

But, looking back, I'm glad I put that "work" in because it was a truly phenomenal feeling to see the results so quickly.

One side effect of this Tactical Overdose Method may be your brain doesn't know you stopped solving the problems so you see them repeat in that stage just before you fall asleep and sometimes dream about chess.

But if you're ready for a chess training mission like no other, I personally encourage you to try it even if no one else says it's a good idea. I did and it produced some good, noticeable results.

Maybe it will for you too. Either way, don't get down and out. Losses are learning experiences.

One other suggestion I'd like to make is the consistent approach. Don't look at improvement as something that must happen now.

Think about bodybuilders. The guys who start out skinny eat everything in sight and spend hours in the gym that first week and see no results at all except for soreness and strained joints.

Some of them quit then.

Others, who understand it's about making the new health and fitness changes for the rest of your life, are in it for the rest of their lives, look at it not as a short-term fling, but as a long term, lifelong, new habit they put into their daily routine as part of their now new, everyday lifestyle.

A year down the road, these guys are huge compared to where they were just before they started.

And it only took a year to see results.

Consider my suggestion and look at chess as part of a new lifelong, lifestyle.

You may not see instant results. Does anyone? Not that I've ever met. 

So you're definitely not alone.

But...

Keep at it consistently when those first  "1 week and no results" folks quit.

A year from now, you'll smile when you look at all the progress you made because you stuck with your new habit and lifestyle.

I hope this helps you! 

One more thing to watch out for with this method... Your friends who used to be able to beat you before, may accuse you of taking chess steroids, but that's a small price to pay for more chess strength, isn't it?

about how to handle losses, think about them like this:

if you always win, winning won't be fun anymore and you won't  like chess anymore

You improve more when you lose than when you win, after you lose a game anylize it until you found your mistake(s) and found a better move you would be satisfied with. "If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger"

those people would be full of it. spending time to learn how to actually play chess is not comparable to taking steroids. at all. in any way. whatsoever.

how ridiculous. "yeah, you beat me, because you went and learned how to play, becoming so good as to completely nullify the unfair advantages I had because of these specific circumstances and conditions that were highly favourable for me and highly disadvantageous for you. god. such a jerk."

we all know who the real jerk is.

I never really thought this question though before this moment. So bear with me, I am making this up as I go along.

I will start with the following two axioms.

Winning at chess rocks.

Losing at chess sucks.

Any time you engage in any activity that involves a winning/losing result, you of course run the risk of losing. Especially if you do it a lot.

And I really don't like to lose. But I keep playing chess anyway. Why?

I guess because I find the winning rocks, more than the losing sucks. So I end up with more positive energy than negative.

I could do something other than chess. Say, Sudoku. And suceed/fail at that to try to get the same rewards. But the rewards wouldn't be the same. Because in chess, there is a human opponent, doing everything in his power to destroy me. Competing against that kind of adversity (when I am sucessful) produces greater satisfaction than any solo activity ever could.

.

Heh. I tend to watch Comedy sitcoms (of course, the Big Bang Theory, How I met your Mother) after an loss. But when i want to psyche up, i turn a few pages (yes, of an actual book) of Profile of an Prodigy. Ah yes, reading about Bobby's trials & tribulations (and ultimate sucess) somehow makes my own angst seem...dunno...less than trivial? It's all about perspective, i guess. I do know for myself i'm not the player i wanted to be, and oftentimes, i'm not satisfied with the player i am today. But you know what? Considering all my past highlights and lows to get to this point, where i can actually write about it in an forum like this: "It's truly better to have loved and lost (playing chess) , than to never having played at all...".

8)

Yes, Varelse, that is true.

I can definitely attest to the truthfulness of both those axioms. As someone else mentioned, and you did too, perhaps that is what makes chess so enjoyable? I think you maybe right. Competeing against a human opponant... and the possibility of losing, make winning rock that much more. 

And Najdorf...that paraphrase made me smile. 

I had always thought that that quote was a whole lot of baloney, but maybe in some cases at least, there is some truth in it. 

how'd you guess?

Guess my answer wasn't short enough. 

I thought the only flaw in your advice was that non-paying members such as Java and myself can only do three tactics problems a day.

That was the only thing I was thinking... Though perhaps there are other sites that have a tactics trainer fof somekind on them that I might make use of?

or do it the old-fashioned way with a book of chess problems! (I don't know of any free sites to recommend, sorry).

I feel like I've improved a lot with the Chess Mentor on Chess.com (you aren't restricted as a free member as much as Tactics Trainer), and also with the tools on ChessGym.net - especially playing games against the computer on that site.  After I had a bad sequence, I'd rewind the moves and see if I could identify what a better move would have been.  It allows you to take back moves and re-do them... of course, at that point you aren't playing a legit game, but if you view it as training, you'll come on here and play real people and be better prepared.

Great replies in this thread.

I feel very discouraged after a long losing streak and it makes me want to step away sometimes.  I love this game and want to get better so I just keep my nose to the grindstone and keep playing.  Play, study, train tactics.  What else can we do?

 Well, I am feeling motivated. Gonna do some chess-training!

I don't play much live chess (not enough free time), but if you would like to play some longer games (1-3 days per move) and chat back and forth about strategy and thought processes during the game, feel free to issue a game challenge to me.

(Not that I'm all that great either, but I would also welcome the opportunity to learn.)