how to not get so mad?

why are people so against losing one's temper in a loss, or series of losses? when pro athletes lose, they often get pretty frustrated, all pro or bench warmer. why do chess guys act like they need to be 'zen masters' who are above emotion? it seems like the guys who talk about 'accepting' losing or accepting it gracefully ----  fine, it works for them. but i'm sure for everyone one of them, there's two who don't feel that way, and get angry at certain losses. maybe you guys prefer to forget those losses....... just sayin'

The question here isn't why is everyone against it, but how to handle your temper better. Well, people here don't really suggest constructive things anyway.

My son suffers from the exact same thing. I try to teach him to breathe and detach from his loss. 

I can promise you that won't happen - in fact, depending on how long you've been playing, you probably won't even become titled. Neither will I. How do I know? Because if after you've played chess for a year, if you aren't already at expert level or above, you almost certainly won't ever be a GM. I would speculate that most modern GMs are better after playing their first 50 games of chess than most of us will ever be in our entire lives. Size matters. Nature wins. Your feelings are irrelevant. They have the brain power - spatial ability and visualization skills to calculate long variations, as well as photographic memories to remember everything they learn the first time around, as well as thousands of moves of theory across hundreds of openings.

Size matters. It's all about the neurons. You can try to make up for it by studying very hard and applying yourself, but true chess genius - like Bobby Fischer and Kasparov level is something you're born with.

As to the reason it makes you angry: it hurts you're pride.

DO NOT RESIST THE ANGER. ANGER IS THE PUREST OF EMOTIONS. EMBRACE IT. FEED IT. FORGE IT INTO A SWORD WITH WHICH TO PURGE THE SCOURGE.

'fraid not. fischer studied so much as a child, his mother took him to a shrink, who said there were worse things he could be obsessed with.  He spent the 10,000 hours - the time needed to master something - in his child hood. It was not just something he was born with. He spent more time studying chess than probably anyone else in the world. I play with a guy who keeps saying, 'chess masters just see stuff...' Nope. They simply study more than normal people. A LOT more.  End of story.

Time off the board! Go fishing 😂and have a vacation.👍 Get rid of stress first 

I use to get mad a lot too. Especially during blitz when I would have a won game and would blunder. I then flipped the thought. "How many times was my opponent winning and then he blundered and I won?"

I've realized that blunders a part of the game. If I blunder, I continue to play unemotinally as I can almost guarantee my opponent will blunder too. I've had games where I've dropped my queen only 10 moves later to have the opponent do the same thing or get checkmated.

You will blunder and your opponent will to.

It also helps to think of each game not as a end result, but a step in the process of getting better. Evaluate every game after and don't make the same mistakes next game.

This has helped me to not get upset any longer.

That is utterly false. Yes, grandmasters study relentlessy. But the world's best players all have a leg up on the common man to begin with. They have the ability to see objects in space, and intuitively see what flows into what, flows into what, flows into what. And this increases a thousand fold as they gain familiarity with the chess board. They often need a terrific memory in order to memorize dozens of openings. Most grandmasters have at mastered at least three openings for both the black and white pieces, sometimes going as deep as 40 moves. And those three or four openings can break off and transpose into a countless number of openings. I would imagine that this is especially true for e4 players, being without the obligatory "2. c4". Do you realize how much you need to memorize? We're talking tens of thousands of variations. They also need the ability to remember principles and combination the first time they see them, because there is ever so much to learn, and to compete at the highest level they must continue to learn and accumulate knowledge.

At the top of the chess world, the competition is so very high and so tight that the smallest edge can prove decisive. And you better believe that spatial ability/memory plays a significant role at the grandmaster level...in addition to study. To think otherwise is just incredibly naive.

Don't forget your KARMA 😂👍

its human nature,the point is how you use your emotional of being upset or mad as an energy to develop your way of play,thats the goal..

I think that Lazlo Polgar's experiment disproved the idea that people are born with chess talent.  Unless all 3 of the Polgar sisters just coincidentally happened to be born with the alleged "chess gene".  Sure these sisters have *some* (but not all) of the same genetic inheritance, but you very rarely see multiple geniuses among siblings (if you disagree, please name some examples).  More likely, the Polgar sisters simply benefitted from sustained intensive training during childhood by a very effective teacher.

Polgar's positive assertion that talent can be cultivated says nothing about the negative that talent is not inborn. 

Totally disagree.

If anything, the Polgar sisters strongly prove that genetics, not teaching, dominate high level performance.

Lazlo Polgar has never produced any other chess player remotely close to what his daughters can do. If it were more nurture than nature, he would have a stable of super strong chessplayers, which he does not. 

His ideas were very kooky to begin with and looked upon highly skeptically both back then and now by experts. Lazlo simply got lucky in that his daughters were extremely gifted in the field he chose for them.

There are countless fathers who choose to push their children in sports, arts, and other activities similarly hard, and vanishingly few become world-class level.

The fact that all 3 sisters progressed extremely highly as well is further proof that genetics dominate - all 3 of sisters were head and shoulders over all their female opposition (and dominated most male opposition.) This sort of sibling-similar talent is seen across all activities (Williams sisters, etc.) It's extremely common to see siblings in families go to similar-tier colleges (like Harvard-Yale, Havard-Harvard, etc.) - you rarely see stuff like Harvard-crappy college, unless the lagging one has clear reasons accounting for it (clearly not trying, being interested in something else besides academics, etc.) In contrast, adopted kids raised with natural-born upper middle class kids of similar age (and the adopted kids being adopted in infancy so ALL their parenting was identical) often end up in jail or barely even making it to college while the similar-aged upper-middle class sibling goes to an ivy league school. If it were as easy as sending dispriviliged kids/orphans to live with well-to-do educated families who have a track record of high educational achievement, we would have solved the educational problems of abandoned children long, long ago just by moving them to these homes. Alas, genetics is more powerful - by a lot (even if nobody will say it outright since it's akin to racism if you do.)

Note that I'm not saying the Polgar sisters didn't need to train to get amazing - they had to train their butts off! But had you or I had the exact same training, we'd be not much better than we are now due to our lack of talent.

Judith Polgar could play high level chess blindfolded at the age of 7. Any parent can tell you that you cannot teach that sort of ability to any average kid - you have to be born with it.

I should have been more precise with words.  You're correct that the Polgar experiment did not prove that we are not born with chess "talent", whatever that is (above-average spatial acuity?).  But it seems more likely that since Mr. Polgar achieved a perfect 3 out of 3 score (at cultivating grandmasters from inexperienced children), it probably had to do more with his excellence as a teacher, and the enthusiasm for chess he inspired.

I've never heard of any strong emprirical evidence that exceptional chess skill results *primarilly* from genetics (although it seems reasonable that genetic factors help).

How many chess geniuses can honestly say that study and practice were not the main factors behind their success?  Certainly not Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, and the other well-known modern elites.  Maybe Morphy or Capablanca?  Even if there are a few examples, the vast majority of accomplished chess players clearly studied and practiced very much to develop any innate talent they had.

My point was not that genetics don't matter at all.  Instead, I claim that study and practice are more important than genetics.  In any case, AFAIK, we can't know for sure since there are no credible scientific studies.

I agree with this sentence.

I also agree with some of the rest. However, if you think there are no credible scientific studies, you might looks at the publications of K. Anders Ericsson for starters. On my desk, for instance, is Ericsson and Neil Charness, "Expert Performance: Its Structure and Acquisition," American Psychologist (August 1994): 725-747.

The mention of 10,000 hours that one finds in such books as Shenk, The Genius in all of Us and Malcolm Gladwell's books are discussed in this article. I do think that Shenk understands the science better than Gladwell and explains it more accurately. 


There has been some critique of Erisson's work in the past few years. See http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/30/0956797614535810.abstract

If you don't enjoy chess, then it is a waste of time -- for you.  If you enjoy chess, then it is no more a waste of time than is any recreational activity. Surely there is time and need for fun. Life should not consist of just work and suffering.

If it's recreation and it fails to waste time then it lacks value. 

That's likely true for many in the bottom 50%, but i can assure you that even bullet players in the upper 20% exercise critical thinking.