Beating yourself

At some point within the last few years on my journey of chess improvement I realized that most of my losses occurred because in one way or another I was beating myself rather than forcing my opponent to beat me. In one sense this is unremarkable, since the only way it's possible to lose a game of chess is to make a mistake that your opponent can exploit. But not all mistakes are created equal, and even when I win I can tell the difference between winning because I played well and winning because my opponent self-destructed.

The most common way to beat yourself is blundering, and most games between weaker players are decided by exactly this. Over the past few years I've worked very hard to avoid obvious tactical blunders, and while I still get bitten by this every now and then--I just lost a game this morning by hanging a piece--it's no longer the most common reason I lose. My biggest problem now is getting into time trouble, another way to give games away without the opponent really having to exert much effort. I have lost many, many games where my position was equal or better because my clock ran out, or because I blundered trying not to let my clock run out.

At my level, despite what I keep hearing from stronger players, games are not usually decided by blunders. At least not the obvious tactical kind that I made this morning. Even so, the losing player usually loses because he made a foolish decision. My online ratings started increasing when I realized this, and there was a skill involved in "doing nothing"--making moves that didn't make any threats but also didn't weaken my position. I'm still working on this skill, but I've made some progress. I was surprised to find how often I didn't need to make any threats in order to win; all I had to do was keep my position solid and give my opponent a chance to make a mistake. Doing nothing is something players at or below my level really struggle with, and I started winning a lot of games where nothing much was happening in a position, my opponent would try to force something to happen and it would backfire.

As the strength of my opponents has increased they seem to be a lot better at doing nothing, and they're able to find "nothing" moves that don't damage their position very quickly whereas I struggle to find such moves in a short amount of time. This is why in so many of my losses I feel like I'm still beating myself rather than the opponent beating me. If only I could just do nothing and do it fast!

There are a couple of ways I could fix this problem. One, I could get better at finding "nothing" moves in a reasonable amount of time and continue to try to let my opponents beat themselves. Two, I could avoid the "nothing move" strategy entirely, trying to obtain and maintain an initiative during the whole game, keeping my opponent on the defensive as much as possible and trying to force him to make mistakes. The problem is, if I could do that effectively I'd probably already be playing that way. The "nothing move" strategy has worked better for me up to now, but as would be true of any strategy I have to continually get better at it to beat stronger opponents. In a lot of cases it just depends on the particular position; there are some games where you really have no choice but to be aggressive as the nature of your advantage depends on it, where in others if you try to force things that can't be done it's like banging your head against a brick wall.

If I continue to improve, at some point I'll get to a level where the opponent never beats himself, and any good result will be a product of my own good play rather than my opponent's mistakes. But that point seems a long way off right now. If I can even get to the point where when I lose I'm not just beating myself, that would be a big step forward.