Tilt and How to stop the bleeding

Hello everyone!

This is my first blog article and I want to bring up a topic which has hurt my ego in the past massively, even leading me to delete my first account on chess.com. TILT.

All levels of players all the way from beginner to intermediate, all the way to the Grandmaster level experience tilt. However, the severity of it does differ.

When GMs tilt, they lose probably 1-2 games where their play has been questionable, usually to other masters of similar strengths, in some rare and shocking cases though, a massive upset can happen due to the master underestimating or not paying much attention to the position.

NOTE: The following videos are not meant to harm the reputation of the players within them, it's rather meant to be used instructively of rare cases where these do happen.

An example where GM Hammer falls into what probably is opening prep by MasterZachary, and in the following game blunders a pawn against GM Krikor Mekhitarian and loses control the next following moves.

After one loss, the strong GM tries to play normally but blunders due to the lack of concentration or loss of his undoubtedly strong killer instinct, most likely because of such a heartbreaking loss in the previous game.

SO... That is the aspect from the perspective of masters...

How about patzers like myself?

Well.. I can speak for myself as just 10 days ago, I was rated 2308 in blitz and up to this point, it is my highest ever blitz rating and so it can be said that I was playing my best blitz ever. However, in just 2 days, I dropped my rating by 171 points!! to 2137. This session was terrible and I remember my win rate of 51.7% dropping to 50.6% due to a string of around 15 loses?! More or less.

I blame the cause of my tilt on being increasingly angry and not being focused with the game, instead solely on the result. This is why I recommend everyone to have an attitude like IM John Bartholomew, after a loss, he shakes his head a bit, analyses the dubious moves he made as well as his opponent and carries on. I highly recommend everyone to follow his great attitude on chess.

How to stop the bleeding?

So I've developed a strategy that basically ensures the constant rise of one's rating daily... developed is probably too much of a praise of whatever I came up with. It also prevents you from losing too much time playing online and keeping you sidetracked from more important things in your life.

But basically, in the morning after being fully conscious and mindful, strap yourself onto a computer screen with stretched out hands, good internet connection and a good mouse. And play one game.

If you so happen to win that game, I would recommend you stop playing for this morning session and instead use that time for your work or school.

Instead of playing too many games, you can use your break time to use Chess.com's incredibly useful computer generated analysis and find your inaccuracies and blunders of that one game you did win. Your knowledge of your openings will be improved and you gain rating consistently without dropping!

Of course there are some days that you lose your first game, if you really have plenty of time that you could use to play online chess and you are passionate in increasing your rating. In that case I would recommend you to allocate a time period in your day where you play a good number of games (I recommend 3-5) and try to focus on the board in front of you without a single distraction so you can put your maximum effort into your consistently improving game.

If you play the same opening repertoire as you always do, you can keep finding great online sources such as ichess.net for their incredible lectures or the Saint Louis Chess Club Youtube channel to keep improving.

I've used this strategy mainly to help push me from 1900 to 2000 very slowly yet consistently, then I've used it to increase all the way to 2300.

DO LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES AND KEEP STRIVING BUT FOCUS ON THE IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF YOUR LIFE FIRST.

I say this because I've been massively tilted before and been in a bad mood for a whole night until I've been reset-ed into the morning.

Another great article I recommend you to read is one written by GM Daniel Naroditsky on blitz chess time management: https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-art-of-time-management

Thanks for reading! Please do comment below and let me know what you think of this article!