What I Learned From Losing 200 ELO in Two Weeks

Aside from the fact that I'm bad at chess.

Three weeks ago, I wrote a piece called “I Gained 125 ELO in 30 Days with This One Cool Trick*.” The asterisk indicated that the thing which helped me gain 125 ELO in 30 days was not, in fact, One Cool Trick; it was a disciplined metacognitive strategy designed to force me to slow down, think better, and learn from every game.

The great Nick Vasquez left this comment on the piece:

Folks: if Nick Vasquez says something to you, you better listen. Because here’s what happened. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been alone in a house in Albuquerque. My wife has been working late; she’s shooting a pilot here, and TV production tends to run long hours. I don’t know anyone here, other than my son, and he’s a baby. After I put him to bed, I am left to my own devices.

So what have I been doing? You guessed it: playing a lot of online chess. But, like, I’m relaxing. I’m enjoying myself. I don’t need to analyze all my games when I’m in that mode, right? I can just play and have fun, right?

Right. Here’s what my rating chart looks like over the last 30 days:

Two weeks ago, I peaked at 1861. Today, I stand — sit? lie? — at 1678. And, you guessed it: I have not been annotating most of my games during that time. It worked so well that I stopped doing it.

This was a fascinating experience. Not an altogether pleasant one, but fascinating nonetheless — and I’m happy to report that I learned a few things from it that might help you in your journey, whether it’s through chess, life, or anything in between.

I’ve separated my takeaways into two categories: emotional lessons and chess lessons. We’ll start with the emotional ones, since those have the widest applicability.

EMOTIONAL LESSONS

— YOU’RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR HABITS

Okay, this is the obvious one: this is what the good Dr. Vasquez warned me about. I stopped reviewing my games consistently, and, sure enough, the gains I made by faithfully sticking to that approach disappeared as soon as I stopped.

I had convinced myself, when I crossed 1850, that I was, all of a sudden, an 1850 player. Maybe even a 1900 player. Maybe even a 2000 player. Maybe I was an expert. Maybe I was a master! Maybe I was the second coming of Alekhine.

Or maybe I was an idiot, and the reason I had gotten to 1850 was because of my habits, not my inherent virtuosity.

If you want to know why I think reviewing my games has such a beneficial impact, you can go and read the original piece. But if anything, this experience has only further convinced me of that fact. If you want to get better, review your games. Review all of them. You’re only as good as your habits. When your habits fall off, so will you.

— STOP AT THE FIRST SIGN OF TILT

So, here’s a follow-up question: when I started to lose rating points, why didn’t I just start reviewing my games again? Why didn’t I get my act together?

Because I was tilting so hard that I made Don Quixote look like Daniel Halladay.

After every loss, I would think, let’s run it back: I need to make up for those rating points. After every win, I would think: let’s ride the hot hand. I was reacting to my games emotionally rather than from the perspective of chess. Instead of considering what I could learn from the game, how well I played, or if there had been any interesting moments, I merely sought the dopamine hit that comes from winning.

This isn’t just bad for results. It feels bad, too.

The reason that tilt is so potent is because it impacts our ego; when tilted, whether at poker or video games or chess, the results we experience threaten our self-perception. A loss suggests that we aren’t the great player we thought we were, which makes us even more determined to win; ironically, this desperation then negatively affects our performance, creating a death spiral. As we sustain paper losses, i.e. losses that have yet to be cashed out — for example, an online chess session that isn’t over yet — we become more risk-seeking, and the bigger the loss, the worse it gets.

Tilt compounds over time. The only escape is to nip it in the bud as early as possible. The same study that illustrated how risk-seeking behavior increases as we sustain losses also demonstrated that, by ending the session — “cashing out” — we interfere with that loop, reversing our appetite for risk.

As far as online chess goes, this means anything that prevents you from clicking the big green “Start Game” button. For example… reviewing your game in a Lichess study. Hmm.

There are other ways to reduce the probability of getting tilted, too. Like:

Oh, big green button. How I love you. How I loathe you.

— DON’T PLAY WHEN YOU’RE TIRED

This is a simple one. Because online chess often feels more like a video game than anything else, it’s easy to default to it when you’re worn out or just looking for a break. Now, there are obviously ways to just play chess for fun: I tend to treat blitz as my “recreational chess,” where I go when I just want to mess around, try out new openings, or whatever. I don’t really care about my blitz rating. But if you care about your rating and are playing to improve, then this is the worst time to play: you’re least likely to perform well and least likely to muster the attention necessary to derive insights from your games.

My friend Max Ross, who is right around my level, always says that he thinks his online rating most directly correlates to how well he’s sleeping. And, wouldn’t you know it, I have not been sleeping well over the last two weeks: I’m at high altitude, my baby wakes me up at random hours, and my wife has been out working until well into the night. So: maybe this wasn’t the best time to get fixated on my rating.

Which leads me to my next point…

— DON’T WORRY ABOUT YOUR RATING

I know this one is easier said than done. And I will admit that I fell into the trap of caring a lot about my rating after I wrote a newsletter about how much my rating had risen — making me feel, consciously or subconsciously, like I needed to sustain that rating in order to save face in front of my dear readers.

But the truth is simple: my online chess rating matters so little. So little! Like, hilariously little. Less than basically anything. At least my USCF rating impacts who I get matched up with and could, theoretically, lead to accolades down the line¹; my rapid rating on chess dot com means nothing.

Of course, I care about chess; I want to get better. That’s different from my rating, though. Sometimes, I play great and I lose; other times, I play terribly and I win. Because I got so fixated on my rating, it ate into time that I could’ve been spending on actually improving at chess, whether by reading books, doing tactics, or, you know, reviewing my games.

This fixation on my rating doesn’t make me a bad person. The craving is natural, and the human organism is very susceptible to the constant stream of feedback that a rating updated in real-time provides. That’s why I need to take measures to avoid falling into this trap. If I learned anything from this experience, it’s that this is not how I want to engage with chess.

CHESS LESSONS

I’m pleased to report that, while I failed to analyze my games as I would have liked to, I did retain the presence of mind to notice some chess reasons that were causing me to lose. There are four:

— DEVELOP YOUR PIECES

Hilariously basic. But turns out that, even in the top 0.5 percent of chess dot com’s rapid rating pool, one of the biggest reasons I would lose games would be that I would fail to fully develop my pieces. I’d get lured in by some material gain or attacking prospects, and all of a sudden, my king would be awkwardly stuck in the center, or I’d have some knight I couldn’t get off the back rank. If I had just focused on developing my pieces — you know, playing sound chess — instead of trying to notch quick wins, I would’ve avoided many of these losses.

This tendency was often exacerbated by another bad habit:

— DON’T PLAY SO FAST

Part of being tilted means that you don’t just want to get those rating points back — you want to get them back quickly. That’s why you keep smashing the “Start Game” button instead of slowing down to review.

MUST. PUSH.

But it also means that you also tend to play too fast during the game, hoping to get a quick win. This is only made worse by the fact that so many people, even in the rapid rating pool, play insanely quickly, and at least on a personal level, I’ve found that this speed of play in my opponents tends to aggravate me: if they’re playing competently, it gets in my head. (This happens over the board, too.)

When I do have the mental wherewithal to slow down, I tend to find that they’re not playing as well as it seems, and also that they usually end up making some colossal blunder out of nowhere — hanging their queen, for example. If I’m also rushing, though, I’ll miss it, and I’ll end up losing the race to the bottom.

For example: in the above game, my dude hung his queen 30 seconds in. But because I was rushing to keep up with him, I played Ng6, blocking the check, instead of snapping off the queen. I went on to lose, surprise surprise.

Playing too quickly doesn’t just affect the quality of your own moves, however. It impacts your ability to perform a very fundamental task of good chess:

— THINK ABOUT WHAT MOVE YOUR OPPONENT IS GOING TO PLAY

I’ve noticed that, more than anything else, this seems to be the thing that separates my high-quality online chess from my low-quality play. How much am I considering what my opponent is about to do? Obviously, when I’m OTB, and I have hours and hours, I think extensively about this. But when I’m playing a game that will last a maximum of 20 minutes, it’s easy to just rattle off the moves that look good to me without stopping to really consider what my opponent will do in response.

Turns out, you get surprised a lot when you play this way. As I have come to understand it, playing chess well is as much about understanding where the other player wants to put their pieces as it is about where you want to put yours. If you don’t stop to consider where that might be, you’re only playing half the game. And it’s surprisingly easy to do this when you’re online, and that other person is behind a computer screen in France or Indonesia.

Again, like developing your pieces, this isn’t exactly Magnus Carlsen-level insight here — but it really clicked for me when, deep into my slide, I realized that this was the task I was shirking the most. And it reinforces why reviewing my games helps me win: if I know I’m going to review a game afterward, then I tend to think more deeply about it while playing, and this includes putting myself in the headspace of my opponent.

— ACCEPT THAT LEARNING A NEW OPENING WILL COST YOU GAMES

I will likely have more to say about openings in a future post. But on a very elemental level, you should understand that, when you’re learning a new opening, you’re going to lose some games as you figure it out. I’ve been learning the Caro-Kann, and I definitely ended up in some weird situations in games where I played that opening and then failed to understand the dynamics of the structures I ended up in.

Good rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t play it OTB, then you should assume that playing it online might cost you rating points. And that’s fine. Just don’t get mad about it.

FINAL TAKEAWAY

In the spirit of how I do my game reviews, I’ll offer one final takeaway from this experience:

— CONSIDER WHY YOU’RE SPENDING TIME ON CHESS

Over the course of being a human, it’s easy to reduce every task to one objective: win.

Make the most money. Get the best job. Have the most followers. Etc.

You don’t need me to tell you that this is a terrible way to live, and that this attitude is ruining everything. But you might need me to remind you that this kind of thinking can show up anywhere. Like, for example, in your chess.

Why do I play chess? Is it to win as much as possible? Is to have the highest rating? Is that really the reason? Or do I play chess because I love the game: its beauty, its complexity, its creativity? And if that is the case, wouldn’t I be better served using my chess time deepening my understanding of the game, rather than mindlessly trying to boost a meaningless number?

Yes. I would.

So I’m appreciating these last couple of weeks as a potent reminder of why I engage with chess in the first place, and how this engagement can best serve my life as a whole. I strongly suspect that this will be more beneficial for my performance than any tilted marathon sessions will be, too. But that can’t be the reason I’m doing it: the reason has to be because it’s fun. Because it’s enriching my life. Because I’m growing as a result.

HERE’S WHAT I’M GOING TO DO ABOUT IT

In the spirit of this newsletter, though, I’m not just going to diagnose a problem: I’m going to offer a solution. From now on, I’m going to try and follow a study plan. My goal is to organize it into three day blocks: on day one, I’ll spend half an hour working on Chess Tactics From Scratch, the book I’m currently reading; on day two, I’ll spend half an hour doing tactics, and on day three, I’ll play two or three rapid games and review them. Rinse, wash, repeat.

With any luck, this won’t just break my vicious cycle of “Start Game” button smashing — it will also get me back into serious chess study, and make me better as a result. My plan is to post a video of my Wednesday rapid play and review on Friday.

I’m curious how this resonates with the folks reading. Do you, too, get crazily tilted playing online chess? Or are you the kind of person who would rather spend an hour doing the Woodpecker Method than lose to some teenager playing 1. b3? Leave a comment and let me know!

1. Not that I expect any. I am not the type of person who thinks he’s going to be an NM one day. In my wildest dreams, I harbor the fantasy of reaching Expert, but… let’s just say I’m not counting on it.