You Are Your Rating

As always, opinions are my own, not those of Lichess.org.

It's easy to write self-help blog posts which tell readers what they want to hear. This is not one of those blog posts. Allow me to quote You are not your rating by @BenjiPortheault:

The ability to temporarily get out of a laser focus on rating and improvement is one of the best things you can do for your well-being. Paradoxically, it is also one of the best things you can do for your chess, replacing the painful with the playful.

Lichess offers Zen mode for those who wish to hide their rating during play, or in general. My rating increased since I started using this feature, making it easier to play confidently against masters and harder to underestimate lower-rated opposition.

A common "self-improvement" problem

Players fail to be objective in their reasoning, while they also fail to seek out coaches or mentors to learn from. Players set new year's resolutions only to give up on them; even tracking tools which remind players to practice tactics, openings, or games X minutes per day, week, or month can't yet offer the same insights a real coach can offer. To optimize self-improvement, we need to have an awareness of whether we are improving, and whether we are meeting our own goals.

In my previous post Long-Term Goals Are Malarkey I explained that people conflate dreams such as, "M months from now, I want to achieve rating R," with shorter-term, measurable goals, such as:

• I want to visit a chess club and meet stronger players who can help me.
• I want to learn the first few moves of an opening.
• I want to learn rook and pawn endgames, since I keep losing those.

What is missing right now?

When asking players why they win or lose, often they explain their opening knowledge, or talk about having superior time management because they manage to avoid the stress of time pressure. Sorry, the iron triangle is real -- pick two:

• Play excellent moves
• Shuffle pieces quickly to avoid time pressure
• Avoid risk-taking and challenging positions

If you don't understand that time pressure is normal, and likewise that risk-taking is normal, perhaps we are not playing the same game. This isn't some psychological condition, although one could make a case that modern technology reduces people's attention spans. Saying, "The engine says the evaluation is X," or fixating on the clock seems to miss out on a wealth of human experiences learning and teaching the game.

Pragmatism

Why time and time again do I mention endgames? Well, if you're playing in a tournament, and if you can survive the opening and avoid throwing the middlegame to some tactic, your closest games against peers in your rating category will be decided in endgames, typically when both players are already in time pressure. (That is, likely you were going to lose against the master anyway, and likely you were going to beat the beginner, so if you are losing endgames in time pressure, you have an endgame skill issue!) If you know which endgames are winning, drawn, or lost, and your opponent does not, you can swindle half-points and full points.

Time on your chess clock is there to be spent when you need it!

Holistic training

Besides physical training (diet, sleep, exercise), I would suggest an iterative approach:

• Review your games to learn from your most common mistakes. Don't stop with surface-level tactics, but have the endless curiosity of a child who keeps asking, "Why?" and try to understand not only what you missed, but how you got into that situation in the first place.
• Seek out other players to learn from (don't be complacent learning from your favorite source).
• Make sure you're still enjoying the game (don't burn out just because you think you know what you're doing when you could be asking for help).
  
  image credit: Randall Munroe (xkcd)

You are your chess rating, and all your other chess achievements. You are you!

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Image credit: Konstantinos Papadopoulos