Impulsive moving

Hey people,

I started playing chess in November 2017. My first rating was around 900-1000pts. (rapid/classical) and slowly, over the last couple of months, I managed to increase my rating to 1600-1800pts.

So far, my training scheme is simple: (a) play a lot of games and analyse my mistakes afterwards (b) tactic puzzles (c) watch streams/videos.

Despite lacking opening theory and endgame wisdom, I feel my most urging flaw is what I want to call “impulsive moving”. Often or not, I deem a move as good and instantly go for It, without analysing it to the full depth. Most of the time I just blundered badly. This is losing me a lot of games and although, the more I play, the better it gets, sometimes I’m just the biggest moron on earth.
Believe me, it is not just losing games. “Impulsive moving” turns me into an irritated person, which yells and screams like a baby. My girlfriend recently called me a freak. I smashed my laptop after hanging a queen. This is a serious problem.

How do I stop myself from immediately moving, but start thinking more deeply? Please help.

Best regards,
b

"How do I stop myself from immediately moving, but start thinking more deeply? Please help."

Firstly Chess is just a game and smashing up expensive tech like a laptop is not good, I bet you regretted it as soon as you did it?

My advice would be play some correspondence games. 1 day a move etc, look at the board, for 10 mins, then go away, come back a few hours later and reassess, analyse your inital instinctual move to the nth degree.
Yes your first move may be the 'right' move, but Chess is not about a single move per say, it's about building an attack, a strategy, controlling space and asking questions of your opponent every time they move.
Easier said then done, I should know, I am a novice with just 3 months experience.
But if Lichess and the members who have helped me here have shown me anything, it's play longer games, avoid bullet and blitz and maybe even rapid and stick to classical or correspondence.

@bigott #1
If you read "Move first, think later" by IM Willy Hendriks you might draw the conclusion that impulsive moving is fine, except that in your case you probably first need to improve your chess level more. (Trying to say that impulsive moving does not need to be the core problem here. Often when chess player develop a good "intuition" then the first move is often right).

A fellow chess club member told me that GM Timman said more or less this during a lecture : "To play a good chess game, one needs to have inner peace".
And of course that is correct. If you feel good and relaxed, then there's more chance to find good moves.
But if your head is full of grocery lists and to do things, and personal matters, then it can be in the way of finding good chess moves.
And then, when annoyed and angry, to continu playing chess right away can lead to a downward spiral, making more mistakes, and losing.
1500/1600 blitz on Lichess is still a level where a blunder in each game is "normal". With 1700 this is already much better is my impression.
Apart from inner peace one needs to build patience.
Not only patience with yourself, and being supportive to yourself (e.g. Don't blame yourself too much and too often for mistakes, and give yourself compliments for good games or good moves), but also patience in the chess games.
The stronger chess you play, the more chance you play strong opponents who usually have quite some stamina and patience.
In otb tourneys you will see the stronger players play really long games where there's just a small advantage, that they like to convert.

The suggestion to play correspondence chess to improve your chess is a great idea. Just make sure to take your time.
I play corr. chess in a local team, and I see several of my opponents blunder, probably because they don't take the time to look at the positions thoroughly.

Take it easy. Good luck, and ... have chess fun !

Eventually you will get to the point where moving impulsively is good and overthinking your moves costs you small amounts of advantage

@bigott It seems to me like you are putting a lot of time into chess and dedicating a lot of energy into the game. That is good ! Yet i've noticed the more and more dedicated you become, the more critical you become of yourself and your play.
Relaxing is ok, taking a couple of days off is also ok. Switching time controls may help, but not necessarily , the most important thing is that you make a vow with yourself. Simply what you need to think is that you want to improve as a player and not simply win games. That will take a lot of losses and mistakes as well as a lot of thinking.
You obviously are looking to improve yet without mistakes along the way, it will be impossible. The vow you need to make is to try to stay positive and slow down your play and think about what your ideas/plans are.
Finding the correct move does not imply you have the correct idea. You may find the correct move or even idea, but not the right order and so on... small flaws will always present themselves and create frustration. Slow down your play and forgive yourself when you make mistakes because they must be made along the way.
Everyone deals with problems like these, stay positive and break when you need to.

.... You have improved a lot and come a long way ! Keep at it.

Hey people,

thanks for the input. Some nice thoughts here!

It is definitely true, that when I'm more relaxed/calm, mistakes become less frequently and they don't tilt me that much. I try to work on my inner posture and quite playing chess for the day, if I feel irritated. Lost me a lot of games, playing on, while my head kept spinning.
I know improving doesn't come without mistakes, the problem is, when I do a "impulsive move", it's just a waste. Why not think 2 more seconds, and see the wrong doing?
I played some OTB games lately and I have noticed that I never do such thing! I take my moves serious. So this might be a "internet chess" problem. And the core might be the focus on "rating" as a measure for improving, instead of simply acquiring experience.

I definitely will play longer time controls. Rapid/Classical are fine, but with blitz I just get annoyed to easily.

BTW. are there any good streamers, who play "longer games"? Most of the streamers play blitz/bullet and only a few seem to play classical/rapid. Any suggestions? So far I like IMROSEN and Sladgy.

best regards,
b

@achja

I've not read IM Hendriks' full work but does he really go THAT far?

I can fully see the reasoning behind his criticism of "building an evaluation function" before each move (what a nonsense concept indeed) or the danger of overcalculating things (I had a bad tournament a while back where I would've been better off rolling the dice between the candidate moves).

But doing at least a couple superficial calculations + a quick blunder check should be a massive net gain over just playing a good-looking move. Does he really disagree on this?

The second point of criticism would be that the intuition of an IM/
GM is somewhat better to start with compared to starters ;)

I'd say that you (@bigott) shouldn't completely ignore the "impulsive move problem" if it's there. The danger of a superficial play IS there (or if you want me to turn it around: I know talented players who improved massively after starting to think for a bit / calculating things).

Then again, it's a rather easy habit to fix, especially with you not playing for very long.

Streamers who play "longer games":

I'd say you could check out:

- John Bartholomew has a lot of 10-15 min per game videos on youtube channel

- pro chess league (this is a rapid team chess league/tournament). There is a lot of coverage on this, even Magnus has uploaded a video of him playing a match there). A lot of high - very high level rapid games but you have to do a bit of research to get the commentary you need (chessbrah / the other major internet site + some of the teams providing some)

EDIT: there are vods of WCH in rapid chess as well. Might be too complicated at first though.

EDIT2: I more than agree on @achja 's comment to the state of mind. It's quite a big puzzle part.

@SnackYourPawn #7
I don't remember the exact wording (I gave the book to a friend after reading it) but IM Hendriks did say something like :
"It doesn't work like that. When you show a chess player a position, then immediately there's a few candidate moves they want to play. That is normal." in the sense that it doesn't work like "Force yourself to first go over the position characteristics, find the imbalances, look at the pawn structure, count pieces etc".

Here a review of the book by IM Silman :
http://dev.jeremysilman.com/shop/pc/Move-First-Think-Later-p3741.htm
Website of the book :
http://www.movefirstthinklater.com/english.html

Any time you make an impulsive move you send me one dollar. When you're finally out of money you can find your inner peace.

"How do I stop myself from immediately moving, but start thinking more deeply?" I sense, that answer is right in the question. Perhaps just stop moving immediately and think more deeply before you move, huh? :)