Therapy Thread

I'm having a hard time emotionally opening any game right now so I thought it might be productive to make a therapy thread.  I'm already not very good with the endgame. I've just made a nasty error for which perhaps only flogging would be appropriate.  It hurts a lot and I am waiting for the pain to die down.  Please include any recent mishaps in your games.  Also...how do you tend to feel after such a blunder? Any physical pain?

I just feel ugly.

Perhaps the best therapy is not to dwell on your losses but remember your successes and your wins. 

Here you have,i felt pretty stupid after this one.I was playing against  very strong WIM rated around 2350.She soon threw me away of my opening theory,her attack had many threats but i ended up resigning in a position i could perfectly keep playing.

http://blog.chess.com/Smartattack/trashed-by-a-2350-wim-in-blitz

I am getting tutored by someone on this site and he says to me

"Emotions have no place in chess"

I have games which I feel have really worn me down (not going to post any because they are just BAD games!!)

Good luck Afaf

blackfirestorm...

But to have devised a clever way to win and then throwing it all away in one move...I don't know how to tell my tummy to stop hurting when I look at this game. 

Perhaps your coach means while deciding moves there is no place for emotions?  Thanks for the kind words.

His response was in reply to:

"This guy just opened (this way) and we are out of book on move 3, I hate this game and drives me to tears each time I look at how badly I am screwing up"

His full reply was:

"Chess is chess and emotions have no place in it. You will never be a better player all the time you let emotions rule your play!"

I do not hate my tutor because he is right. Emotions DON'T have any place in a game of chess. How can I sit here and think how badly I am playing getting all upset about 1 game?

I currently have about 35 games on the go and thankfully that "fateful" game has ended a long time ago.

I am an emotional person and hate it when I see I could have made a better move but you have to be cold and analytical to see beyond the blunders and mistakes.

I wish you loads of luck Afaf :)

I had a 30-minute game on FICS last night.  It was one of those long, tiring games, as my opponent was pretty strong and I had to calculate a lot.  Nevertheless, in the middlegame I won the exchange and a pawn, and the game was mine.  So it was just a case of converting the win.

After a while, my time was getting very low.  I was tired, and I just wanted the game over.  So I began rushing.

Rushing wasn't working, as my opponent was hanging on for dear life.  Several moves later, I still hadn't ended the game, and my time was getting critical.  I began to panic.  The position was as follows:

I played Qe7??? and immediately resigned in disgust.  I could not believe it.  Not only had I overlooked the obvious ...Qxg2#, but also ...Nf3+.

Rushing is bad, always.  Lesson learned.  :D

Hi Afaf, I picked up on your recent predicament on the public notes of one of chess.com's many jerks and sycophants. For some reason this site sadly has more than any other chess site and in the last year or so their number has grown significantly. My point is this, we have played but once and I found you to be a very pleasant person, an asset here to this site. It would be a shame to see you leave, and for what it's worth, you can influence the chess.com locator to place you wherever in the world you please.

It is unfortunate that the many 'virtual' jerks in here (who have no real lives to speak of) have nothing better to do than cruise around the site reading blogs and often giving their unwelcomed opinions. I read of your predicament (would you believe) on the public notes of one of these sad cases - it beggars belief why, when they can chat in their games across the board or send a personal message, they choose to do that. I put it to you that these sad people have no lives of their own and are as likely as not incapable of having one. Rather, they choose to come in here and act like complete imbeciles - the game of chess taking, very much, a back seat! Why is it they use their public notes as an extension & bill-board for their pathetic virtual egos? It is extremely sad - it is as though they have to advertise and say "hey, look, I'm popular". The worst of them upload dozens of music videos which, quite frankly, if they wanted to do so it seems to me they should open a youtube account instead of filling chess.com's servers to aid their egos and attempt to advertise 'cool'. Often they cruise around passing uninvited comments to every female they can find making comments on the pics, avatars, blogs etc. seemingly trying to build their own personal harems. We all do it from time to time, but these sad cases make a carreer of it! It is their raison d'etre!!!  Again, is it not CHESS that should be their main focus? It seems to me they would be much more suited on dating sites and youtube rather than on a chess site, but maybe that frightens them. Unfortunately, there are some females here too who are deficient and encourage this attention and I'm sure you be well aware of some of these.

My point here Afaf is just this, don't let the jerks and sycophants here on chess.com and the females who crave and pander their attention sway your judgement or make you feel any less beautiful than you clearly are!

Please stay and continue to contibute to chess.com being a better place.         

One last point - make NO apology for showing emotion!!!

My take: In OTB chess, after any blunder, regardless of whether it changes the outcome of the game, take a little bit of a breather. Realize that whatever emotion you're feeling may take a little time to subside. Walk around, get some water, go outside. There are a lot of blunder types.

Maybe you had an advantage out of the opening, and you've been increasing it in the middlegame, and then all of a sudden you blunder it all away, so that now your advantage is minimal, if still there at all.

In the endgame, it can be even more devastating, so to speak. When you have an endgame advantage which you're pressing, and you make a non-losing blunder, it can change your outlook drastically. Maybe you thought "hey I'll probably finish this guy off in the next 15 mins or so, then I'll go grab some food". And now it's "crap am I REALLY going to be here for the next 2+ hrs??"

Adjusting to this new mindset in-game can be awfully challenging.

Isn't Afaf talking about an online game?

I was making the point that it's important to embrace the fact that you are not a chess playing automaton with no emotion. Give the emotion time to subside, like a ringing bell, and it will.

Feeling sick to your stomach when you blunder is a healthy response that will hopefully cause you to find the root cause of your errors so that you can prevent them in future games.  It's a sign of the emotional investment you have in any given game and perhaps even a little window into the depth of your obsession with this game.

I'm often disgusted with myself for preventable errors -- literally sick to my stomach as well.  Because I'm so exceptionally hard on myself it's caused me to work towards avoiding them at all costs.  They still happen, but less often than they used to.  This response has probably been the single biggest driver in my desire to improve.

OK, so maybe "healthy" was a stretch....

Couldn't agree more, ozzie.

Good advice yes ... I guess that can apply too to online chess ... 

Agreed -- emotion should have no place in planning but is natural when reacting to a given situation.  As you've suggested, separating the two is important.

I am so guilty of it :(

I play extremely slowly so its a little easier to do in my games.  I think I'd have a lot of difficulty in an OTB situation as well.

You can go even further with this.

If you're in an extremely sharp position, you may preemptively get the jitters because you fear making a ridiculous blunder. This may in turn end up causing the blunder in the first place. So when faced with the choice of entering or not entering complications, you can end up making the choice based on your emotional capacity to handle the sharp situation. It's even possible to get through the entire sharp phase unscathed, but to feel "shaken" by it, which may impact the later phase of the game, or the next game.

This is why I play 1 0. No time for any of this. And even if I make a blunder, hey I forgot about the game by the time the next one starts. I made a rather funny one yesterday, where I stalemated my opponent via my usage of premove, along with his rather studious avoidance of my material offerings.

This is my worst howler in recent memory.  Pure unadulterated carelessness.  Enjoy:

http://www.chess.com/echess/game.html?id=16602464