Tilting in Chess

This post is dedicated to the start of a hopefully good habit that is to journal my journey in chess. I've been trying to improve for the past two years or so and in two months I'll face my first tournament.

I thought doing this journal privately, but both the aim of being more sociable and the idea that someone else might take interest of what I'm doing made me decide to make it public.

By the time I'm writing my top rating was 1567. My rating is relevant because my highest score was just yesterday, today I'm at 1502. Some might think that losing -65 points doesn't mean much, and surely it doesn't, but the way I believe I lost them is the key subject of this post. Tilt.

And what is tilt? Is hard to use other words beyond tilting itself to describe the hunger of playing the next game or doing the next move without the mental capability of doing so, often due anger.

The term was popularized by poker but it originated from pinball machine, if the players got too angry and started literally tilting the machine, it would freeze and the player would lose the game. The idea remains, if you get to angry, you lose, and if you lose, you get angry.

I find that the hardest part of tilt is to know when you're tilted. We're very good of deceiving ourselves, we say that the defeat didn't actually affected us, it was just that I was short on time and that made me take bad decisions, but in general it was a good game and we are more than ready for the next challenge. Are we though?

Yesterday I kept telling myself the same lie, that I was fine, that I did had the mental energy to play just one more game, but in the end of the day I noticed that I had lost close to 10 rapids in a row. And why this happens?

I did the research, although neurology is a very non pacified field I'll take the freedom to say this: Its because of losing rating points. Losing a unrated match don't produce the same effect on your brain as losing a ranked match does. This is because you believe deep down that you've EARNED your Elo. And your opponent take what is yours, you immediately have the urge to play another game to take back what has been taken from you. It's the same neural pathways of losing money on a Casino, the same urge to bet again and take back the money that was yours, or even losing a  real life asset and doing everything you can to take it back.

You might think it's not true, but looking inside of myself I find myself relating to those points. The metric I like to use is: If I'm not in the mental state of doing a puzzle, then I'm not in the mental state of playing a game. Of course, if your aim is to just have fun and pass the time, play as much as you like. But If you want to improve your chess and climb the rating ladder you shouldn't fall for tilt.

Tilting isn't something new in my life, although I'm still bad at chess I had very good ratings in other games such MOBAs and FPSs, and believe me, different shadow of the same problem. I obviously didn't mastered Tilt and frankly I don't even believe is possible to be a hundred percent immune to it, but I decided to take action against it and will share some tips below of how I intended to work around it to be in my very best in my tournament in March.


How I intend to deal with Tilt:

• Playing less games, that doesn't mean necessarily playing less time, but if we have 2 hours to play maybe we should try only two 30 minute games instead of six 10 minute games, not just because is more didactic, but also because you brain will suffer less strain from the defeat and that will make you whole to keep training and studying chess.
• Consider to closing my chess game session after a defeat. You can't always do that, of course, not just because training frustration is also important. But if you have to play after a defeat, make sure that is for the right reasons, as in a situation that playing three games was your plan in first place.
• Consider swapping playing time for reading time after a defeat. Just to share a little bit more, currently my routine is every free time that I have for chess shared evenly between, openings, tactic puzzles, chess books and playing. As all humans I often find myself playing more than all others, but I know that this is a problem. Reading is the most soothing option of training chess, so after a defeat we should definitely consider a soothing strategy over the craving of just one more game.
• Only start a rapid game after successfully finishing three tactic puzzles in a row. As I said, this is a good metric to know if we're tilted or not, if you don't have the brain energy to do a puzzle then you don't have the brain energy to play a game.
  
  That's all folks, see you next week!