Chess and Coffee

I find a bit of coffee helps me think clearly, but too much is counterproductive. A caffeine jag interferes a bit with positional judgment. I carefully moniter my coffee intake on days when I have a tournament game in the evening.

Coffee is good for your chess.

/end thread

I too am drinking less coffee these days - I'm down to just 2-3 pots per day.  I see no impact on anything as a result excepy i'm less mellow.  I'm no smarter, no slower and I don't sleep any better.  But my Cardiologist says my irregular heart beat that was caused by the coffee has slightly mitigated.  I wonder if the benefit is worth it??

down to 2-3 pots per day? That's still a lot of coffee.

Because of how caffeine works on the system, you would have to lower your caffeine intake to less than 100mg a day to see any real affect. That is about 1 cup of coffee depending on the coffee you drink.

Anything over 200mg a day(which is what you would be drinking with 2-3 pots of coffee a day) and you are no longer getting any of the 'benefits' of caffeine.

I think the attractiveness of the the idea of caffeine is that you can have a temporary mental high. But than it is followed by a crash. I would consider the benefit of not being in this constant up and down. Without caffeine your body learns to alert itself and to stay alert throughout the day. Imagine waking up in the morning and not having to crawl to the coffee pot for your morning jump start. Your just awake and you won't be crashing and till bed time comes around.

Sounds tedious.

Caffeine is a very insidious drug. 

It gives you that great feeling to get you hooked, then, logically, you up the dosage to get that feeling again. But, in the end, you just make yourself addicted to it.

Wanna have that caffeine high most of the day without drinking coffee? Exercise. 

Exercise has some of the same effects on the brain as coffee. Exercise can also become addictive. And when you finish, you doh't crash.

When you finish you get fat & flabby.

Coffee does not do that.

After vigorous exercise you can crash, hard, exhausted in a stupour.  Naked in a gutter, unable to feel your extremeties or even to remember your own name.  No pain, no gain, bucko.

drinkingcoffeedirnkingcoffeedrinkingblackcoffeedrinkingcoffeeeverydaypotspotspotsblackcoffeedrinkingblackcoffee

Coffee makes the world better.

And it helps on Sunday mornings, too.

Yep but not too much

I rather have a glass of wine while playing chess.....I drink cuban coffee and gosh...makes me too hyper!   I could not sit patiently......

It wasn't blitz, it was on the Chess Time app with a time control of 3 days per move. When both players are online it obviously goes a lot faster than that. I think we were each taking about 1-2 minutes per move, but the alcohol certainly didn't help him.

I'm always drinking during my games on ChessTime, sometimes even when I make a move.

My longest ChessTime game (in progress now) has been going for three weeks. I cannot say how many bottles of wine I've emptied in that time.

dang ol moonshine get you blunnder up yeah like a dog and heat humphumphump blunder!

Hump, hump, hump...?

Fleetwell, You still off the stuff? I myself have not been able to even start the process of quiting. Worse yet I have added a can of soda at some point during the day.

If coffee is black posion, what on God's green earth is soda?

I just won two games on time today where I hadn't even realised that my opponents were getting close to running out of time. One was only started yesterday with 1 day per move (he set the time control); we made 10 moves each in about 15 minutes and then he forgot to make another one. The other game was 3 days per move, and I reminded her a few moves ago that she was running out of time; this time I forgot.

Soda is poison. Coffee is divine nectar, surpassed only by wine in elegance and general excellence.