From breakdown to breakthrough: how setbacks became my personal glory in chess

Hi everyone! I'm Adriano Nunes Cavalcante, a 25-year-old university student and an amateur chess player from Brazil. I'm mostly known in the chess communities through my handle AdrianoNunesFX, notably on Chessable, and I've written extensively about my chess journey (here, here and here). This blog post addresses my greatest psychological struggle in chess: becoming a titled player. You read that right, I'd say that the technical part wasn't even that difficult compared to certain demons I faced along the road.

I wrote the first draft in March 2025, and I've been rewriting it and polishing it on and off throughout the year with the idea of publishing it on the Chessable blog, as they have sponsored me a few times, but ultimately I decided to release it here as I'd have total control over the content. IMPORTANT: This blog post was originally posted on chess.com, and unfortunately there is a limit of pictures per blog post on Lichess; I had to replace them for chess games. While it doesn't decisively affect the text, it's still relevant to point it out. You can see the original version with all the pictures by clicking here.

I should highlight that you don't need any prior knowledge about chess or my previous blog posts in order to be able to go through the material here. I tried my best to be clear and honest about everything I went through to develop myself both as a player and as a person, and my objective here is to inspire the reader to do the same.

I'd like to say thanks to every single one of you who supported me one way or another, and I'm proud to repeat that even though chess is an individual sport, I was never alone! Now, with that said, I hope you enjoy this blog post!

SUMMARY

1. A step back...
2. ...to leap forward!
3. Celebrations and my thoughts on studying chess alone
4. What comes next?
5. A brief reflection on mental health
6. Final words

1. A step back...

This story begins where I initially thought it was the end of the journey: when I achieved my dream of becoming a National Master. The job wasn’t finished yet, I just needed to tie a loose end and that would be it... but what was simply a matter of formality became my greatest struggle in the game. We need to rewind a bit, let’s return to October 2022, right after the tournament that made me NM...

Natal, the capital of Rio Grande do Norte, is a beautiful city. I played two very important chess tournaments there in my 'career' so far. Photo: Personal archives.

After the tournament (FIDE Zonal 2.4) ended, there was this feeling of 'victory, but not quite', as I knew I still had to cross 2000 FIDE in order to be able to verify the title on Lichess and chess.com. Not only that, according to the tournament’s rules, I’d also be eligible for the FIDE Candidate Master (CM) title, so there was this 3-in-1 goal. I was totally fine with it, as I had just obtained 1960+ FIDE and I had convincing victories against strong titled players, besides the infamous game where I almost beat GM Alexandr Fier in that same tournament. I just needed one more good performance, right? A matter of formality, like I said earlier?

That was quite the fall! I really thought it would be impossible to recover from this. Photo: FIDE.

I proceeded to have a string of bad tournament performances, losing many games, several with one-move blunders, all because of this pressure I put on myself. I was just a few games away from my goal, and suddenly I saw myself dozens of games away from the aforementioned 'formality'. To me, not having the NM title verified felt like I wasn’t even titled in the first place, especially with the increasing number of 'embarrassing' games I was having in OTB tournaments. I hit my lowest rating in February 2024 at just 1806, and although FIDE readjusted it to 1885, I almost abandoned chess for good. I was facing many issues in my personal life, many of which I thought I wouldn’t be able to overcome. As a matter of fact, I went weeks straight without playing a single online game. I only didn’t quit because I had a scheduled trip to São Paulo; I had a small feud with a local air company due to some serious delays in my previous trip, and they offered me free plane tickets as compensation, which I accepted.

The first megalopolis I've ever been: São Paulo! A huge city, full of skyscrapers and history. Luckily, I'm not afraid of heights! Photo: Personal archives.

Before I continue, let me state something that's being implied throughout this post: you don't play chess to relax, you relax to play chess. I truly believe this sport is extremely brutal if you're dealing with other serious stuff, and I'm not even talking about mental health yet. As fate would have it, I was facing the consequences of certain setbacks I had in my life in 2023; to quote a relatively small one, I got robbed and lost important pictures along with my phone, and it's not surprising that I wasn't willing to add losses in online chess to my list of troubles.

This even reminds me that the third world's chess champion José Raúl Capablanca has a quote that says something like "every loss is a lesson", which is quite funny considering that he barely lost a game himself! I was just wishing that I could 'stop learning' and finally start winning, I was tired of this pedagogy. Like many chess players, I do have this burning competitive feeling within me, and while I never managed to completely put away the pain I felt whenever I lost, I was always polite to my opponents and I never had any public outbursts.

Every loss is a lesson, but eventually you should 'stop learning' and start winning!
—Adriano Nunes Cavalcante.

As I was saying, I decided to play in the Brazilian amateur chess championship in São Paulo, which would be the last chance I would give to the game (or myself). All I wanted was to avoid bleeding even more rating points – just gaining one single rating point would make me happy. No high expectations, no “I must beat everyone, I deserve it” nonsense, I just wanted to chill. Would it be my last chess tournament ever?

2. ...to leap forward!

With my lowered expectations and increased focus in the games, I had a solid performance (three wins, two draws and one loss), netting me 11 rating points! I’m not kidding: I cried out in joy when I finally won some rating after losing so much of it in the last year. I finally broke the cycle!

This was the first step to recover my form. I was seeing the magic happening right in front of my eyes. It was all about relaxing and not letting the pressure take over. I decided to stop thinking about results and simply establish modest rating gains (e.g. 10-20 points after each tournament) as goals for each tournament. At that period, my rating was 1896, I had 104 points to go after – the grind just began!

The beautiful Salvador, one of my favorite trips ever! Brazil's first capital (1549-1763) showcases an extremely rich culture and highly receptive people. If you like to party, you should consider going there! Photo: Personal archives.

Afterwards, I established an unprecedented streak of good results, gaining rating points left and right and quickly rising to 1972 FIDE in October 2024 (it's important to mention that I was able to fund many of those tournament trips thanks to the job I had as a social media manager for ChessDojo under IM Kostya Kavutskiy's supervision). In many of those, I either remained completely unbeaten or only gave up a few points. I was once again one step away from reaching the milestone of 2000 FIDE and becoming NM... twice. However, I needed to stay calm and not get ahead of myself. I played in my state’s chess championship, where I drew the top seed (FM rated 2278 FIDE at the time) as Black but then I proceeded to tilt hard in the following three games! Fortunately, I was able to regain my composure for the last game and even ended the tournament with rating gains, clocking out at 1977 FIDE. “Ok”, I said, “In early 2025, I’ll achieve my goals and go beyond”. One bad tournament after several good ones didn’t give me reasons to complain.

I know, it's kinda random, but I couldn't resist sharing this; in July 2025, I played the French-Egyptian GM Samy Shoker in a simul and then I challenged him in a Capoeira roda! Photo: Claudia Aquino/Chess.com

In February 2025, I was ready to play a 1900+ FIDE event in my hometown, seeing that even a 50% performance would push me over 2000 FIDE! This didn’t mean it would be easy to do so – there were quite a few strong and underrated players attending, and anyone there could beat me. I needed to focus, play relaxed and accept that maybe that tournament wouldn’t be the one where I would cross 2000 FIDE. Funnily enough, I was paired with the top seed in the first round, rated 2184 FIDE, whom I managed to defeat convincingly and then I was just ONE game away from my goal! Then we arrive at the decisive game, against a 2042 FIDE rated player!

After some inaccuracies, I was able to gain a clear edge that eventually resulted in two extra pawns for me. The win was still far away; it was a queen endgame where it was easy to squander. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the cleanest sequence of moves, keeping the pressure going, and this eventually led my opponent to make a serious weakening move that I immediately exploited. Seeing that he was about to lose another pawn, my opponent finally resigned, which also made me cry – discreetly – over the board, a scene that was being streamed on Twitch and YouTube!

3. Celebrations and my thoughts on studying chess alone

On February 28th, 2025, FIDE confirmed my new rating and both Lichess and chess.com verified my NM title a few hours later. I can’t describe the moment I logged in to both sites and saw my NM tags next to my name – finally, my once distant dream had become reality! I couldn’t wait to play my first Titled Tuesday! I started to play some online games and it was really nice, and then I realized that on March 1st there would be a Titled Arena on Lichess, so I decided to make my debut there. I was intending to play only for one hour, but I got so hyped that I played until the end. What would otherwise be a great performance where I almost cleared my top rated victories on Lichess in that event alone ended up being overshadowed by one particular win that will be my biggest scalp in a long time... versus the Indian prodigy and world number 42 GM Nihal Sarin!

A week later, FIDE awarded me the Candidate Master title. It was now official, all the loose ends were taken care of! It was time to celebrate! It’s been such a joy that even now I still smile when I think about those moments. As you can imagine, after a few months I decided to swap NM for CM on my online chess profiles, just to be consistent, even though I liked NM more. Naturally, I already played some Titled Tuesday events and caused some upsets, although none of them compares to the incredible and unexpected win over GM Nihal Sarin, at least until the time of writing. I hope I’ll surpass that record at some point! But what am I going to do next? Am I pursuing the FIDE Master title? How about life? I'll return to that shortly, I'd like to share my thoughts on studying chess alone.

Training chess on your own is a very tough task. I've quickly realized that being a self-taught chess player didn't give me any bragging rights at all, it's rather an obstacle for my improvement. I always had to go through all my classical games alone, choose by hand what chess books I'd study and report all the results only to myself. Since 2020 I've been studying exclusively on Chessable, and this eventually led them to sponsoring me; I would be unable to fund the tournament that made me NM and later CM without their support! Even without a coach, I found a way of holding myself accountable: I started to annotate all the games and leave them public on Lichess and chess.com. Benefits of being an amateur player, of course.

This is part of my dear collection (other trophies and the medals are somewhere else), they represent how my life was changed forever thanks to chess. As you can see, I brought a humble souvenir from every Brazilian city I've ever been. Photo: Personal archives.

Sure, I'd sometimes be unnecessarily rough on myself due to the undesired results, but all the successes were greatly celebrated! Whatever happened within the 64 squares was entirely up to me, and outside of them I could count on the support of many marvelous people. Sometimes, I doubted I deserved all of that. You wouldn't believe how many times I've lost a game merely because I sabotaged myself by saying "oh, I'm gonna blunder and ruin my tournament again". What if I tell you that when I started to become more confident my losses suddenly became more uncommon? Sometimes, that's the only little life-hack you need.

There is a chess arbiter in my hometown, Moezio Correia, who always says: "Luck is when opportunity meets preparedness". This is exactly what 'luck' means to me, no mystical powers or anything like that, it's just grabbing tightly any opportunity that arises. Have you ever noticed how lucky very strong players are? They're lucky in the games, in the pairings, in the tiebreaks, in the time trouble... So many aspects, right? The opportunity often appears somewhere that is completely out of your control: your opponent's decisions. Whenever they make a mistake, you need to be mentally and technically prepared to exploit it. Being patient when winning and stubborn when losing are very important skills for any ambitious chess player. I couldn't help but notice how much luckier I became once I started to stabilize my results in OTB chess, in any time control.

It should be noted an important lesson that took me ages to learn: skill often beats knowledge. I tried to pull off a hermit-like approach by training hard during the pandemics and expected to have amazing results when OTB play resumed. As you've seen, that wasn't the case. There were so many things I had to improve... Believe it or not, even your breathing during critical moments can affect the outcome in your games. There is no other way around: in order to improve your chess you have to actually play chess. Only training won't make the cut, while only playing can quickly lead to stagnation. Everything depends on what your goals are, because you'll need strong motivation in order to go through the difficult challenge of studying a complex subject like chess. I started to understand this better when I became a coach myself, different people have vastly different quests and challenges. Originally, I just wanted to expand my chess budget when I started coaching, but perhaps there is potential for an academic research? We'll see!

One lingering question is: did I do enough? When you're in a miserable environment, you can definitely feel like you haven't achieved anything. I can easily state that the joy I felt when I claimed both the NM and CM titles was the same joy when I first broke the 1500 mark in online chess. For some people, however, all of this is worthless, and even becoming world champion at just 18 years old is unconvincing to them! I encourage the reader to not let their misery devalue your achievements. As a matter of fact, the majority of chess players will cherish your progress! Celebrate every small step you make!

I usually smile for the pictures, but here I was quite tense because that was the decisive game to reach the CM title. That's my game against Dr. Pedro Neto. Photo: Claudia Aquino/Chess.com

In the end, it's all about opportunity cost, because when establishing our goals, we should keep in mind what we're willing to sacrifice to accomplish them. In order to illustrate this, think about the extreme idea of pursuing the Grandmaster title: are you ready to dedicate several years of your life to claim it, giving away much of your quality time with family and friends? I don't, and I wouldn't envy the kids who spent their childhood and teen years to reach the elite. See, everyone can make their choices, my point is that we shouldn't feel bad about the outcomes we had in chess, even less so if our achievements don't include the world championship title, sometimes we're happy and we don't know it! There is no need to 'regret' learning chess at a later stage in life.

4. What comes next?

That was quite a long ride! I’ve lost count how many times I doubted myself and asked if everything I was doing was only vanity, or if it was even worth it. I was often trying to find ways of justifying myself even though no one was asking anything from me! Now I see that I was pushing myself too far. I was somewhat hypocritical for not remembering that the whole reason I kept playing chess after learning the rules was the socialization and other incredible opportunities chess provided for me. This makes much more sense now, because when I ask myself 'Ok, I got those shiny letters before my name, now what?' I see that I would be completely alone if that was my only goal in chess.

Now that I come to think of it, this is likely a good question; am I going to pursue higher ratings/titles in chess? Well, maybe, but this time without any pressure or hurry whatsoever. Given that I decided to claim CM, I considered it reasonable that I’m now on a sort of mission to increase my rating so I can add more value to the title. I don’t think I’m at my peak yet, but I’m not feeling obligated to hunt down the FIDE Master title, for example. What I can say for sure is that I’ll work hard to have good games while having fun. Gosh, having fun playing chess is something that I stole from myself for quite a while, I’m so relieved this is finally returning to me!

I also have a goal that is sort of related to chess: visiting every single Brazilian capital, and I’m halfway through this objective; hopefully my international debut isn’t far off. If any of you have seen the pictures I shared on my previous blog posts or simply on my Instagram account, you will know that traveling is something I enjoy A LOT and this is among the amazing possibilities chess allowed me to have. Do you think I prepared for my opponents during my free time? No way, sightseeing was the number 1 priority, just as I stated earlier! It’s even better when doing it with other people alongside me. I’ve often asked myself how much different my life would be if I wasn’t introduced to chess in 2017.

From 1885 FIDE classical in the July 2024 list to 2043 FIDE classical in the November 2025 list, not to mention rapid and blitz! It's so hard to believe that it feels like magic now. Photo: FIDE.

As for life outside of chess, well, I have many plans. I’m a young man full of hobbies, and my secret is knowing a little about everything. Chess is among those activities that I’ve invested more myself into, but other notable examples are: Martial arts like Capoeira and Muay Thai, cooking, karaoke, Just Dance and dance in general, writing, teaching, philosophy, astronomy, photo and video editing (that’s where 'FX', as in 'effects', comes from), languages, traveling, swimming... I have so many hobbies and so much work to do, I can’t wait to go after the 'National Master' title in every single one of them! I even have some surprises for the academic life too, we'll see how things go!

5. A brief reflection on mental health

If you've made it this far, you probably realized that mental health was a thing here, even if it was mostly implied. Even though I never had developed depression or anxiety, nor have I ever needed medication, I gave myself and the people around me some really hard times due to the self-destructive and low self-esteem behaviors I showcased back then. Getting to the point of almost quitting chess for good was quite intense, but imagine how things went for the chess players who suffered with the aforementioned conditions?

GM Daniel Naroditsky (1995–2025) tragically passed away at just 29 after struggling with his mental health. Daniel was a kind and generous person, and even those who weren’t close to him felt the profound impact of his untimely death. May he rest in peace.

Mental health is a very important subject, it's just as important as the body's health. I stated earlier that chess is a pretty brutal sport if you're dealing with other serious stuff in your life, poor mental health will very likely worsen in such a tough environment. The most cruel part of all of this is that's simply too difficult to notice when someone is suffering with his/her mental health, and when something extreme happens, our first instinct is to blame ourselves. We SHOULD NOT do that! If you're dealing with mental issues or if you know anyone who is facing it, never hesitate in reaching out for help!

In memory of my friend Abias Jacobsen (2001-2023), a strong chess player and the greatest math teacher the world didn't get the chance to see.

6. Final words

In the beginning of the story, I mentioned that I wasn't alone in chess, and I give the people who supported me the utmost credit for all of my victories. I'd like to say thanks to every single one of you! Everything is ours! I should mention that I had a long list of names to share here, but in the end I decided to remove it to protect their privacy. By the way, a little high-five to the people who read the original drafts and gave me invaluable feedback: Sean "Ducky" Lee, Chris "vatdad" Haggstrom, Renato "Torrubirubi" Bender, Gabriel "gavalanche", Stephan "Belgian" Raab, "Frank", GM Alex Colovic, WIM Luciana Morales and IM John Bartholomew.

That's me with my greatest supporters! My father Cristiano, my mother Adriana and my younger brother Wandervelde! Picture taken during my high school prom, in December 2017. Photo: Personal archives.

In the end, as I was about to wrap up this blog post, I played my fifth and last intercollegiate nationals (Jogos Universitários Brasileiros, click here to see the Lichess study) in early October in the city of Natal, that very same city where I played the FIDE Zonal 2.4! With a fantastic 5⁄6 score (five wins and one loss), I claimed the bronze medal, this being my best performance ever in classical chess! The celebrations we had there and when I arrived home were definitely among the best feelings I ever had in my chess 'career'!

Ending the year in a high note! I'm sharing the podium with NM Gabriel Norte (2nd place) and NM Michel Ferraz (1st place). Photo: Paulo José/CBDU.

It’s fitting that this story started with my worst performances and ended with my very best – so far! I was able to overcome my struggles, chess really made me stronger as a person, and I definitely didn't see everything falling so perfectly in its place. Crazy butterfly effect, eh? I really hope the reader will have fantastic times with our dear game and enjoy amazing experiences just like I have!

With the best regards,
Adriano.