Chess Enlightenment

“What happened?” My wife asks rather nonchalantly.

Despite my body language suggesting I have just witnessed a terrible car crash, or been held up at gun point - she knows I just came back from chess club.

“It was worse than bad”, I announce.

“What happened?”, she repeats.

I groan and curl up into a ball of despair.

THE WRONG PAWN

So what happened?

I had played a long and arduous queen endgame and finally my opponent blundered into a lost pawn endgame. I correctly assessed the winning line, forced the queen trade and then played the second pawn move of my winning line first!

I am devastated, angry, confused - all at once.

A few rushed and flustered moves later, I offer my opponent my hand and quickly escape to hide in the toilet. It was there, mid-piss, that I realised I had probably just resigned a drawn position. This was also a team game and, instead of drawing the match, we lost it on account of this mistake.

As I exited the toilet, the arbiter and a fellow club member stood over my board next to my opponent, and asked: “What happened?”

I didn’t answer and headed straight for the door, too scared to open my mouth in case I vomited over the remaining pawns.

As I cycled home, I realised that I may have caused mass confusion. Perhaps “what happened?” was not an enquiry as to how I had messed up the ending, but a genuine enquiry as to whether I had resigned or offered a draw.

What an embarrassment.

The loss took me weeks to get over and set me on a quest to make it all stop. As I lay with my cheek against the hardwood floor of my hallway, I thought about the pain in my body. I realised the feeling was old yet familiar.

It was heartbreak.

It hurt so much that I knew I needed to find a solution. Not just for me, but for all amateur chess players out there. For my students, who I know sometimes feel the same way. And for my wife, who stood there looking at my sorry, crumpled form, wondering why she had married a chess player instead of a Hungry Hungry Hippos enthusiast.

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THE WRONG ARTICLE

This post was initially going to be titled ‘What’s the point of rapid training games’, a follow-up to my post: what’s the point of puzzles. However, it struck me that whilst I could point out the benefits of playing rapid training games - and do point them out on a regular basis to my students - that does not actually help them do the work in the same way that pointing out the value of puzzle training does.

The problem is so prevalent that I have had multiple conversations with my chess coach colleagues about how to solve the problem of motivating our chess students to actually play chess.

What a world.

To be clear, I also know a lot of players who if anything play too much, and sometimes that means they play and play and play, and do not analyse or do anything else.

If you have this opposite problem, then you probably have a lot of chess skill and you probably do not make as many basic board vision errors as your rating peers. But you probably also keep making the same mistakes - mistakes you do not even know are mistakes - over and over again.

So this article is for the people who quake in fear at the thought of playing an online rapid game. Think about it now. You could stop reading this. Go on. Click on the big Lichess button in the top left. Go to the home page and click 10+5. Start a game. Do it.

Fine then, stay. But seriously consider that after this you are going to play a training game. Think about that. How do you feel? Butterflies? Sudden urge to do a poo?

Why on earth does it cause you so much distress?

This fear is the exact thing holding you back from actually playing.

In the past I have attributed it to rating anxiety, but underlying it, there is a fear - not of losing rating - but of the feeling that losing induces.

It might be a mild version of the pain I felt lying on the floor. It might be just as intense. Either way, I think this is what we are all avoiding. This is exactly what we are afraid of.

To play and lose leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. To play and lose in the morning sets you on a negative trajectory for the day, a loss at the start of a relaxing evening can make it not relaxing at all.

And so to conclude the world’s longest blog introduction, I decided I was not ready to write a blog post on the benefits of rapid training games. Instead, I first needed to really understand this core pain, why we avoid it, and come up with a satisfactory method to overcome it - so that we may all learn to play with the carefree freedom of toddlers.

This avoidance of play, something that for me and likely many others is an avoidance of pain, is one of the greatest unsolved problems of Adult Chess Improvement.

And so in this article I set out to solve it. Why?

Honestly, because I felt like I could not continue to enjoy chess in the face of this pain.

HAS CHESS RUINED MY LIFE?

A long time ago, before I discovered the enter key on my laptop, I wrote a blog titled Has Chess Ruined My Life?

The conclusion was: chess has increased the amount of suffering I feel on a day-to-day basis, but that working towards a long-term goal and looking back on all the progress I made over the years, provided my life with deep meaning - and thus the trade-off was worth it. I likened it to becoming a parent - sure, you might not take a shit on your own for a while, you might not have a good night's sleep or an uninterrupted thought for at least half a decade, but you will have children. And in this experience of having children, you will receive more than enough compensation for the sacrificed exchange.

But, unlike children, a chess rating is not guaranteed to grow. And if it does not, what are you left with? A 50% chance of weekly pain at the local chess club and no prospect of that deep sense of achievement.

For some reason, the meaning chess provides me with, had stopped offsetting the pain of losing individual games. For me, those games tended to be long-format classical games (not rapid training games), but the principle remains the same.

The worst part about it, was that my rating was actually still going up, albeit slower than it was at the beginning. The problem was, it was not going up fast enough or high enough in comparison to my friends.

And who are these friends I was comparing myself with? They are younger. They have significantly less children. And my inability to keep up was driving me insane.

No matter what your level is, or rate of ascent, you will always be able to find someone higher rated than you who is improving faster than you. And you probably won’t even need to look that far to find people doing it by putting in much less effort than you, too. This is a fact of chess and life.

This presents you with a choice. You can either actively seek these people out and compare yourselves to them, or you can run your own race. And I was really struggling to do the latter.

Lesson one then, do not compare your body to hotties in magazines and do not compare your chess progress to the incredible people Ben Johnson interviews.

I knew I needed to try and focus on myself and not on how others compare to me in chess.

Is that meaningful? Probably. I will be better disposed to answer that when I am rated 2000.

But before then, I needed to get a handle on this.

So, what else could I do to stop chess suffering?

THE END OF ALL HUMAN SUFFERING

So here we are, half a year into the research for this article and I have simply found the article's goal: in order to play more chess, you have to stop the pain of losing.

That left me with a fairly big problem to solve.

I realised probably a bit too late into the research phase that I was essentially striving to put an end, not to the suffering that came from a lost chess game, but to all human suffering. Not just as a result of chess, but as a result of anything. And thus I realised the article was probably too ambitious, bordering on impossible, and I was terribly unqualified to tackle it.

My initial research saw me reading a lot of techniques in self-help and meditation books. My hope was to translate some of the resources in those books into helpful and applicable tools for the amateur chess player. But this alone was not enough. Or rather it was too much.

I came to see - through close examination of myself and the pain I feel when I lose - that in order to stop feeling that pain, I would essentially need to achieve enlightenment. Now I know the Adult Improver can often have lofty, sometimes seemingly unattainable goals, but total ego transcendence felt like a bridge too far. Even for me.

But obviously I tried it.

And whilst I am not yet ‘Jivanmukta’ (the Sanskrit term for one who is enlightened whilst living), my attempt at understanding and following some of these practices really did lead me to a transformation. I was changed enough that it became worth finishing the article. I feel it is now worth sharing.

Not because I can give you the benefits I have received from hundreds of days of work and practice in a single article, but because it can maybe inspire you to find (or re-engage in) your own practice. And to know that your experience, thus your suffering - even from chess losses - can change.

A NEW ONO

I came out of this process with a changed worldview, a new metaphysical belief system and ultimately a huge reduction in the pains of chess.

I would be lying if I said all of the things I have learnt mean that I no longer struggle, but I can say that things are much better in the following ways:

1. The fear of playing is largely gone. I still feel nervous, but it is not all consuming.
2. The suffering does not linger as long. If I lose on Wednesday, it is not affecting my weekend!
3. Finally, the severity of the feeling immediately after losing is much reduced. I can lose now and still stay at my local chess club. I can even (mostly) enjoy the rest of my evening.

SEEK AND YOU SHALL FIND

Before we really get into it, I want to say that whatever suffering you feel when you play a game of chess, your feeling is not actually about chess. It points somewhere. And if that leads you to ask questions about yourself and grow as a person - then that has enormous value in and of itself.

A long time ago, I realised (mostly through my wife repeatedly telling me) that I could use chess, or the things it brought up for me, to guide me to the places within myself that were worth taking a closer look at. And this past year and a half has been the greatest extension of that.

Because when I lay on that floor, I also understood this was probably not a healthy response to losing a board game.

What followed, transformed me entirely.

It changed my metaphysical beliefs. I feel like I ultimately discovered who I was. I am not claiming to have reached chess enlightenment. And I certainly do not practise everything I am about to write perfectly. But this has helped me more than I can describe.

COLD WATER

I recently had the great idea to teach my kid to swim by taking him to a lake. That will be fun, I thought. And to be fair it was 25C (if you're american that's roughly 23 million degrees F).

So it was a lovely hot day. Unfortunately, it was mid-April and the water temperature was still close to freezing. I got in first and started to swim out towards the center of the lake.

I had to turn back after about 20 meters, fearing my muscles would seize up and I would drown and die.

After that, I decided it was probably not a good idea for my boy to go in. But he was really keen. So I let him try, knowing I could heat him up again quickly.

He plunged into the water enthusiastically with a big smile on his face. As he resurfaced, he immediately started screaming for help.

I used to react the same way when I got into cold water (or started a chess game). I go in freezing water everyday. It is one of the weird things I do on a daily basis. I do not hesitate about going in and I do not flinch or gasp when I go in - not anymore.

In the research for this article, which was an enjoyable but perhaps unnecessary eighteen months, I found a word for what I was doing with my cold water practice.

It is a term that is key to Buddhist practice (amongst others):

Equanimity.

This is one of the best tools I have found that you can use to get over the wretched nervousness and subsequent emotional fallout that comes with playing rapid games - or chess games of any length for that matter.

The reason I enter cold water without hesitation or reaction, is because of the mental preparation I have done over and over again. I don’t do it consciously anymore. I sort of slip into that state.

But to start with I used to dread going into the water. I had to talk myself into it. I would have an internal mantra which I repeated to myself before I got in the water:

It is not good or bad, it is just cold.

It is just a sensation. By repeating this, I guess I eventually disconnected any judgement about the experience and simply saw it as an experience - neither positive, nor negative.

It is just cold. Nothing else. I am just witnessing it. I am just witnessing the body feeling cold. And the witness, the awareness, does not feel the cold. The human I am witnessing does. But that is not me. I am the witness, awareness itself.

I noticed the parallel with my chess games and tried to implement the same practice. I used to dread sitting down to a training game. I used to dread going to my local chess club like I was turning up for an exam. It led me to wonder:

Why on earth was I playing this game as a hobby?

With the work I have done this year, I now play chess the same way I get into cold water. Before I play the chess game, I have an internal mantra that sounds something like this.

“It does not matter if you win or lose. It matters that you play. You are just playing chess.

Losing is not good or bad, it is losing. Drawing is not good or bad, it is drawing. Winning is not good or bad, it is winning."

And I can be nervous. But I am not nervous.

I am awareness itself looking at a human who is absolutely shitting himself.

I am really starting to sound like the Dalai Lama, eh?

Okay, so I might not be the best equipped to talk about this. But the point is that I find my mind slipping into the exact same space it does before I get in the shower every morning. I find my mind becoming an object of my awareness and that mind is no more me than my opponent or the board or the pieces.

When I am in that state, I feel like I am just watching myself making chess moves.

When the game starts, do I keep this witnessing perspective? Absolutely not.

Again, I am not enlightened. And not only am I not sure if I would even be able to play chess in a completely enlightened state, I also know that I might not want to.

Realising that, started by watching a game of football.

SCOTT MCTOMINAY

I used to think football was great. I turned up to watch my team every week, I checked the football news everyday. Until, in my early twenties, I asked myself why I was deriving a sense of personal happiness from the achievements of eleven random men I had never met before. Call it a coming-of-age moment.

I worked this out on the bus back from Dundee, freezing cold and slowly sobering up, surrounded by miserable Aberdonians after a drab 1-0 loss.

I did not put much stock in football after that. It suddenly felt silly to me. All these people deliriously celebrating and commiserating the result of a game over which they had no control.

It might surprise you to hear then that a few months ago, I found myself going to watch my first game of football in over a decade. And I was going to get caught up in the emotion of it like never before.

And I was going to do that on purpose.

The aim was simple. I wanted to feel the emotion of the game for the pure joy of that human experience. And I wanted to walk away from it, regardless of the result, having enjoyed experiencing such luminous emotions because of the pure joy of life itself.

And because I really was not that attached to the outcome, because I now realised I was not the human actually watching the game or experiencing the emotion of it - I could allow myself to disappear into the story of the game and not get lost in it.

Why did I choose football? Because it felt like a stepping stone towards playing a game of chess like this.

I was lucky in the sense that if emotion was what I wanted, I picked the right match.

The game has barely started. I stand there, pint in hand, as young Ben Gannon Doak floats a cross into the box. McTominay leaps and spins. He seems to hang impossibly in the air before connecting.

The overhead kick beats Schmichael in the Denmark goal and I absolutely lose my shit.

My pint is gone. I think most of it went down my back. I am hugging strangers. Scotland just needs to hold on for... 87 more minutes. I spend the rest of the game chewing my fingernails and wincing. 1-1, 2-1, 2-2. Denmark down to ten men.

Then a dodgy clearance drops to the feet of Keiran Tierney. Three minutes into stoppage time and he connects, the ball sails in a great arc and once again I find myself delirious with joy. 3-2. We went on to win 4-2 after Kenny McLean lobbed one in from the halfway line as well.

What a game.

On the walk home, it is all gone. I enjoyed the game. I enjoyed the emotion of it. I would have enjoyed the ups and downs just as much if we had lost. I went there to feel all of it.

To feel the full range of human emotion and to enjoy that. And the result literally did not matter to me. The outcome, whilst nice, had zero influence on my mood after the game was over.

The aim now was to do exactly the same with chess.

1950 v Ono

I wanted to be on board 1. I do not know why, I was just in the mood. We were playing the first team from another Dutch town and they had two good players. A 2100 and a 1950.

So I said to our team captain: I want to be on board 1.

He said no.
I was a bit annoyed, but not being Dutch and blunt, I buried my annoyance deep and said absolutely nothing at all.

And so, board 3 it was. As fate would have it, the 2100 did not turn up and they put their 1950 on board 3. I have seen teams do this before. The idea is that you get an easy point.

I was the easy point.

I cannot quite describe how this made me feel. I sat down at the board and adjusted my pieces feeling like I was about to go into battle. I was angry. I was so pumped I could feel my own heartbeat in my forehead.

“I am nobody’s easy point”.

Jobava on the board, I was locked in. It was one of those games where 4 hours feels like 5 minutes. I don’t think I even got up to piss.

As the game progressed, my position was fantastic. I had a 40-minute clock advantage. I felt this was my moment.

My opponent's time started to run. With 3 minutes on the clock, he attempted to relieve my queenside pressure with an unlikely looking kingside attack.

This caused me to panic, and at one point I was completely lost. Luckily, with just the increment to play on, my opponent did not take his chance. His attack fizzled out and it left his own king exposed.

With checkmate looming, he resigned.

I shook my opponent’s hand and held it together long enough to escape out a fire exit where I proceeded to fist pump the air so hard, I think I dislocated my shoulder.

Worth it though. So worth it.

I emerge victorious to high fives and smiles and hugs from my team, and I feel fantastic.

The emotional ups of chess are not worth losing.

Immerse yourself in the human experience when it is convenient. Why not? It might all be an illusion. It might all be Maya, it might be Samskara, but I don’t need to remember that right now. I can fully experience Ono basking in the glory of his best win yet.

While at the same time, knowing that if I need to take a step back and be the observer again, they are not somewhere waiting for me. They are me. That is who I am.

GETTING THERE

This idea of the witness might not be something you believe in. It is curiously the conclusion that a lot of spiritual and mystical traditions arrived at independently, and one that is being seriously explored by modern physics as it butts up against the hard problem of consciousness.

This is not me telling you there is one truth and I have found it. This is me telling you that sometimes I feel really bad. And chess amplified that. Chess put a magnifying glass on that.

Chess made me take the steps towards finding something that helped me and brought my life more meaning than I ever imagined it could have.

For the curious, I got there by studying the Mandukya Upanishad and the accompanying lectures by Swami Sarvapriyananda. But I think that one sentence is all I really need to say about what I actually did to arrive here. That is not the point.

You do not need to do what I did.

But if chess shines a light on any part of you that you want to change, then I think that is a noble pursuit. I think that has meaning.

And so, chess continues to not ruin my life. Whether I continue to slowly improve my chess rating or not - I feel that I am improving and having chess with me helps.

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Thanks for reading!

The Online Chess Club is my attempt to bring the joys of my own offline chess club, online. The Online Chess Club will have a league tailored to adult chess players, with optional weekly games and flexible match scheduling. There will be weekly community hangouts, guest lectures, and daily accountability training sessions to help you stay on track with your chess goals.

I know there is already a thriving adult improver chess community out there and I want to provide the platform that brings everyone together in one supportive and enthusiastic chess space.

It's the thing I wished existed when I lived in the middle of nowhere, before I had access to a chess club. To get notified when the club opens, stick your email in here.

I also spoke about it on Chess Journeys recently.

I have been teaching chess to Adult Improvers for over three years now. You can book a free trial lesson to see if we are a good fit.

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