As I mentioned in this post, I started playing in chess tournaments a few years ago. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, I had been spending quite a bit of my free time playing chess online for a number of years. Playing online chess is a very solitary activity which can eat up a surprising amount of time: I once played online for seven hours straight. Spending all this solitary time in front of a computer screen moving virtual chess pieces sometimes felt a bit masturbatory. Actually, the wife of one of my regular chess partners once told me, only half-jokingly, that she would much rather her husband watch porn than play chess online, probably because you can only watch porn for so long before your biological limits kick in, and you simply have to go do something else.
But I digress. Anyway, as I was saying, playing online chess started feeling a bit masturbatory after a while, and I decided that if I was going to be a chess addict, it was better to do it in a way that is public and somewhat social, and win a bit of cash sometimes, if I'm lucky. Moreover, there's also a part of me that was curious to find out how well I stack up in the real world against people who play "real" over-the-board (OTB) chess.
So it was with all of this in mind that I played in my first tournament here in Idaho in February 2016. I have found this journey of competitive chess to be very fulfilling so far, even self-revelatory. It might interest you, the reader, for me to start with a sociological observation. I have always thought of chess as being an intellectual, thinking person's game. Before I played my first tournament, I imagine a chess tournament hall to be an austere place with plush velvet armchairs and somber gentlemen in pipes and monocles sitting in dignified thoughtful poses over chess boards.
Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, most tournaments here in Idaho take place in the meeting room of some 3-star hotel such as the Holiday Inn Express, or in some public library. Such places are usually lit by rather harsh fluorescent lighting, and there are no plush velvet armchairs anywhere in sight. Secondly, in place of dignified gentlemen in suits and monocles, chess tournaments in Idaho (and, I suspect, in much of the rest of the country as well) are populated for the most part by two species of humans: Retirees in slacks and polo shirts, and kids. The retirees are older people who have found time to return to the pastime of their youth after raising a family and building a career. As for the kids, a large proportion of them are Chinese. Why is this? I'm not sure, but I imagine that they probably have Tiger Moms who helicopter-parent them and make them play in chess tournaments because of the supposed boost to critical thinking that chess gives to young minds. But despite being possibly Tiger-mommed, these kids seem to enjoy themselves. Being kids, they also seem to have limitless amounts of energy: In between rounds, they either run around the hallways snacking on doritos, or play casual chess games ("skittles") in the break room.
I am neither a kid nor a retiree, and at first, I found myself a rather strange animal in this social environment. Here I was, a 40-something with a PhD in philosophy hoping secretly to wow everybody with my considerable intellectual prowess, being faced instead with the benign indifference of a universe of very young and old people. In particular, the Chinese parents probably thought me a real oddity: What's a grown man doing playing games during the weekends instead of being engaged in something more... productive?
Oh, and speaking of kids, I should also bring up something else here. One of the first things that my (adult) male friends ask me when I tell them that I play in chess tournaments is: Have you ever lost to a kid? They ask this question with a certain kind of expectant look on their faces. I'm not exactly sure what they are expecting, but I suspect that they probably avoid playing chess in order to not have to face the social humiliation of being bested by a kid. Anyway, I always reply to this question in the affirmative without any hesitation. My personal philosophy of chess, if there is such a thing, is that you don't know anything about chess until you have been beaten by a kid. The fact is that many kids are really good at calculating long combinations of chess moves, probably because their minds are young and pliable, and have yet to be corrupted by the mundane pressures (paying bills, worrying about what your friends at work think of you etc.) that plague and take up precious RAM space in adult minds.
Over the course of the last few years, I have actually come to see the presence of these kids as a good thing. With their boundless energy, kids rebound really quickly from losses, and playing casual skittles games with them between rounds helps me to unwind and not take wins and losses too seriously. There's something infectious about their energy and cheerful resilience which helps me to take myself less seriously, and just accept that I am only as good a chess player as I am, no more, no less.
Which brings me to the most important lesson I have learned from all these months and years of competitive chess: Self-acceptance. Very simply, the idea is to accept my strengths and weaknesses (but especially the latter), and kind of just work with them as best as I can over the chess board. Accept that I will only very rarely (if ever) play a perfect game (what would that even look like?), and that 99% of my games will be filled with cringe-inducing mistakes and blunders, and that if I win, it's probably only because, in the words of Savielly Tartakower, I made the second-to-last blunder.
None of this is to say that I should not strive to improve at chess. Rather, the idea is to be more accepting and kinder to myself, and acknowledge and accept my mistakes as they occur in play, rather than beat myself up and become discouraged by them. The effect of this self-acceptance cannot be overstated. More concretely, I have discovered that because of this self-acceptance, I have become more resilient in my games. When I first started playing tournaments, I tended to get discouraged and to succumb to negative self-talk ("Why are you such a poor player? Why do you allow your opponent to get the upper hand?" etc) whenever I found myself in a difficult position in a game. But with self-acceptance, I am able to be more present in the game, and deal with the situation on the board as it is, rather than as what I would wish for it to be, and try to resolve the problems as they occur rather than worry too much about the outcome of the game. The results are pretty amazing. Over the last few months, I've had at least two or three occasions in which I have converted a losing or difficult position into a draw because I have been able to focus on the present moment in the game rather than worry about its eventual outcome.
Needless to say, self-acceptance both in chess and in "real" life is a continual work in progress. I do better at this some days, some days not so much. And I am still trying to fully incorporate these lessons I have learned over the chessboard into my life at large. But that's okay: This is a life's work, and I'm okay with not getting everything right right away.
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