What Does it Mean to Mature as a Chess Player?

11 signs

Disclaimer: These are signs I see in myself, and your mileage may vary. But I don’t think my experience is entirely unique.

• You stop compulsively diagnosing your problems based on a bad loss or losing streak.

I feel like every player who ever had a bad loss or losing streak has been tempted to, and perhaps even made a drastic change to their study routine or opening repertoire to fix a problem that they diagnosed in the heat of the moment after a poor game result. I certainly have! Instead, I should have realized that this was not my most objective moment, and instead use that momentum to analyze my games deeply and then think about the next steps after the pain had subsided. At some point I realized that most of my issues in Chess are skill issues, not knowledge or metagame issues. This change in my thinking can be tracked most primarily through my Chessable opening course purchase history, which has drastically decreased over the last three or so years.

• You begin to enjoy the game primarily for the game’s sake.

This is obviously a point that I can only reasonably apply to amateur players, but, man, isn’t it great when you play Chess and you enjoy playing it and you feel no obligation to turn it into something productive? Don’t get me wrong; I think that Chess can be a great tool for self-improvement, and that it is capable of teaching you lessons about life and decision-making under pressure. I think these benefits can go a long way to improving your life and making it happier. The internal excellence you can acquire and enjoy from playing Chess is one of the best and deepest hooks of the game. But Chess is at its most fun when you’re not thinking about the rating, or about who is the better player, or about how useful it has to be in order to justify it. You can just play the game and enjoy it. And that is Chess at its best.

• You quit attaching your identity to your rating.

This one’s hard. Especially if you’re a self-identified “improver”. Especially if, like me, you’re one of those people who started playing Chess seriously as an adult and made it part of your identity to be an “adult improver.” Chess comes with an identity, and I think that’s alright — our lives are filled with things that constitute parts of our identity and there is no shame in it. But one of the recent accretions to Chess that is inescapable is the Chess rating: the three or four-digit number that quantifies just how good you are at Chess. And that is an entirely terrible thing to attach to your identity. To start, your rating is not just a function of your choices, but also those of your opponents. In a certain sense it doesn’t matter how good you are; if your opponent has the theoretical power to draw the game by force through perfect play from the opening to threefold repetition or a completely dead endgame, this means you only have relative control over your rating, and therefore you should weigh very carefully how much power you’d like to give an algorithmic numeric output over your life and happiness. The happiest and most mature Chess players I have met simply do not give a single fig about their rating because seeking it for its own sake is a striving after the wind. For the rest of us, we will have to do by not letting negative changes get to us so badly. You win some, you lose some — that’s Chess. And Chess can still be good.

• You begin to know enough to know what you don’t know.

Chess is a game that has almost unlimited potential in the things that can be learned and known about it. But it’s really hard to know what you don’t know, when you don’t know much to begin with. The more you know, the more you know that you don’t know. One sign of a mature player is one of epistemic humility about the game. The quicker you are to admit your lack of knowledge in an area, the quicker your potential is to fill that hole in your knowledge. Mature players recognize these moments and take advantage of these opportunities as much as possible.

• You no longer allow someone else’s opening or play style to unduly annoy you.

Ugh. They’re playing the London again. Ugh, they’re pinning my bishop again. Ugh, they’re pushing all their pawns again. Time to go on /r/chessbeginners and complain to people about it, right?

I don’t know about other people, but I have definitely struggled with a negative attitude toward specific moves or ideas, for rather arbitrary reasons, or even certain player behaviors and personalities. In Chess, as long as a rule (in the game, or etiquette) isn’t being broken, it’s best not to become attached to behavioral convention. The power to annoy another player can only be given by that player. Don’t be that player. All that energy spent being annoyed is energy wasted on thoughts and ideas that cannot concretely affect the course of the game — energy that might otherwise save you from making a blunder or some other rash decision. As much as possible, learn to enjoy the player you’re playing against. And on the flipside of this, I think mature players also know how to properly annoy their own opponents and make them uncomfortable over the board for a practical and/or competitive advantage.

• You make choices about your opening repertoire based entirely on your own interests and desires.

One of the strangest phenomena I see in the online Chess world is the fear of random stranger disapproval over their opening repertoire, a very strange insecurity that can cause you to play something you don’t like, for YEARS. Most teachers will tell you to play 1.e4 or 1.d4, and play 1…e5 and 1…d5 against those openings. And they’re right. But if you hate what you play, you’re just gonna hate the game. So play what you want to play, without regard to what others think. Play what you want to play, without worrying if it’s classical, hypermodern, modern, romantic, or any other number of cliches about openings. What matters most is, do you enjoy it? And because Chess is a game, it shouldn’t matter what other people think about your opening repertoire. If it works for you, keep it. If it doesn’t work for you, change it. Asking strangers for advice on Chess openings isn’t a bad thing; but seeking approval from everyone is a losing strategy, especially since they’re not the ones who have to play your games — you are!

• You start to know your weaknesses and strengths, and admit to them.

This comes back to the point of knowing what you don’t know. But more specifically, it is very often true that our ideal self-image as a player embarrasses who we actually are. And therefore, if you want to become better at the game, you have to admit when and where you’re bad at the game. Every loss that you have experienced is ultimately due to your mistakes — take ownership of those losses and admit your weaknesses. Then they can turn to strengths, if you seek to address them. Additionally, when you have a strength, own it. So you’ve got a predilection for the bishop pair? Don’t give it up just because you feel the need to get better playing with knights. You do well with attacking but need to work on your strategy? Well, good strategy leads to attacks — keep attacking! But shore up the strategy. You cannot have an excess of strength in your skillset, so don’t give up the good things you have in the process of trying to improve other areas of your game.

• You stop feeling negative envy toward players who are improving faster than you are.

Can we admit this feeling? Comparison is the thief of joy. And lots of us struggle with comparing ourselves to other players. It was like this for me: Some noob posts an absolutely insane one-year rating graph that shows how they got from 800 to 2000. They did it by playing the London and Caro-Kann. And they never read a book. And they don’t go to tournaments. They just play all day. And suddenly I’m asking myself: “What is wrong with me?” “Why are they so superior?” “Are they so superior?” “I’m probably a better person off the board at least.” “I’m probably more likeable.” “I probably care more about the game than they actually do.” And on-and-on the moralization would continue. And it never made me happy. It took away something that I should have been able to enjoy and celebrate, and made me an ugly person instead. Why? Because I was insecure and misplacing my identity into something that ended up threatening it. Maturing as a player means being able to share in and celebrate other players’ wins and gains without reference or thought at all to your own.

• You stop internally accusing players of cheating, especially when there are no signs of cheating in the game.

Alright, personal pet peeve of mine incoming. And it’s all thanks to /r/chessbeginners, where frequently people are absolutely convinced that their opponent cheated, but instead of reporting the game to chess.com, they posted about it on Reddit instead. If they were better players, they would recognize that their opponents didn’t cheat, right? But, man I have been guilty of this many tens of times during tilted blitz sessions myself! Even to the extent that in my own thoughts I was suspicious of a player cheating, simply because, what, they played the Caro-Kann and got an equal position just like that?? Players who constantly complain about cheating usually don’t have leftover energy to become better players themselves and they let it steal the joy of the game from them. It’s possible people cheat. But it’s much better for you mentally if you simply control the impulse and not jump to negative conclusions — even if it turns out they were. Mature players accept this risk and play anyways and don’t let it bother them. Maybe my opponent is cheating. But the likelihood, 99.5% of the time, is that they simply are better than me. So I might as well take my beatings and learn something while I’m at it.

• You recognize when you’re starting to tilt, and you stop playing.

You set a timer to limit your play time. You recognize the moment you stopped analyzing your losses and instead went straight for “new game”. You talk to yourself and say “no, that’s enough.” You recognize your own negative self-talk and silence your internal monologue, because you know it’s wrong and that you’re just having a case of the Chess Mondays. You know your limits, and you set up systems and restraints to control them until you have the self-control to stop it yourself. For some people this might never happen to the fullest extent, but the better you get at this, the better it is for you. The sunk-cost fallacy matters. Those rating points you lost aren’t yours anymore, and you don’t have to win them back. You’re definitely not going to win them back right now, so be kind to yourself and others, maybe take a nap or a day off, or otherwise quit for a while. The game will be there when you’re ready, and your rating will re-adjust to where it should be. Besides, if you dropped 200 points in a single night, you probably eventually will have an entire week of easy wins as the rating system re-compensates to your actual skill.

• You recognize when you’re not enjoying the game like you used to, and you change the way you relate to the game.

Chess is a hobby, and the winds and seasons of life will dictate to lesser or greater degrees exactly how much time you can commit to it, how sustainable it is, and what reasonable expectations you may have for yourself. Otherwise, you may grow to resent the game and that’s not how any hobby should be. You don’t have to quit Chess (well, I guess some of us might have to). But a mature player learns to recognize when something has to change: the study routine, the time commitments, the tournament schedule, the rating goals. What does it take to make it a game that you love, enjoy, and want to continue playing? What do you need to stop doing? What do you need to start doing? What do you want to do? Keep Chess fun, and you’ll never stop playing it.

• You recognize that there is no killer-app to get better and that low-effort and long-term gains are illusory.

Chess, being worth doing, takes a long to get better at. I think a lot of newer and/or younger players try too hard to find a one-stop-shop to turn themselves into masters; whether it’s a new opening, a tactics course, or some other book, video or resource, we are constantly bombarded with marketing that tells us that we are just missing this one thing that will transform our game into something else entirely. On a rare occasion, this is true. Sometimes, you read a book and you gain 200 points in a month. But more often, things like that happen due to latent skill increases that are starting to surface — skill increases that were planted many new moons prior, and are only now starting to integrate into your game. The truth is, there is no universal rapid improvement formula for Chess. It comes down to playing and analyzing a lot of games, doing your daily and weekly “reps”, and taking care of your mind and body. Chess improvement comes one step at a time. Whatever else people are trying to sell you is snake oil.

What things do you think mark one as a mature Chess player? I’m interested in your thoughts, disagreements, and feedback, so please leave a comment below!