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How To Overcome Chess Anxiety

Thank you for this article. I just sign up recently in a chess club, participing in tournaments to get a real rating and I just keep losing, blundering every time on stupid things. Those last weeks, I thought of giving up and your article gave me hope. I will definetly try your breathing technics and work on having a good state of mind, before finding the best move.
Many times I have drawn or won a lost position when I simply accepted the damned fact that my position was like an aircraft carrier hit with a thousand bombs :)
Noël, thanks for your helpful suggestions.
I am also trying to approach my games with curiosity—what will I learn from this game?—as a way of feeling less anxiety about losing.
It's interesting. I had always read this - that you should avoid being afraid when playing serious chess - but I was just stuck for years not playing well and finally gave up. When I came back to try again, not having prepared and terrified of failure, to my great surprise I played far better. And that was true for years - that being afraid made me play better. I ended up gaining about 600 rating points based mostly on this insight.

It was true for me because I had been mostly over-confident in my play, and being afraid forced me to focus on my opponent’s ideas and plans to a healthy degree, and to put in the work to calculate rather than just throw moves out there - which might not be everybody’s problem. And while I played better when terrified it was an exhausting way to play, so I had to work on how to balance that out.

So I think that people can be different - and in certain cases a degree of fear can be useful, as long as it’s kept under control.
Legit I have this same problem. I love the advice. Thank you so much GM Noel Studer!