Competitiveness is a good thing. It stimulates improvement.
However, you seem blinded by it. What I mean is, you only care about winning, which hampers improvement or in the worst case contracts it. I suspect that if you are on a losing spree, you keep pressing new game (correct me if I am wrong).
After playing a game, try to learn from that game. Analyze it, that also holds for won games. Amateur chess games are full of blunders, from both sides. You cannot improve if you do not learn from your mistakes.
But wait, there's more! I also wrote this epic rap battle about who can see further ahead, check it out
I've been playing chess for some seven years now. It's mostly been a slow uphill progress, but I've also been experiencing purely negative crises about twice a year (or so I think, I haven't really counted), as well as getting stuck on a plateau every two years or so.
But what happened to me today really shocked me. It might not even feel like much compared to my usual chess experiences, but the very fact of it is... frightening. And just when I thought I'd finally learnt to be in some peace with my losses, I was struck right in the [insert whatever hurts the most upon impact] by the following:
I lost to a variant of the Scholar's Mate as Black. In seven moves. In under a minute. In a game with a 15 15 time control.
It is THE very first time such a thing has happened to me, although I've had a lion's share of different utterly moronic losses by now. Yes, I had pulverised my opponent mere seconds earlier with colours reversed in a game with otherwise identical properties. Yes, I asked him for another rematch after my megafluke, but he declined. And yes, he was more than one hundred rating points below me, so at the end of both games in total - I had actually lost points.
Okay, on one hand, I'm more than ready to treat it as a lesson, be it about poor tactical vision, playing too quickly, thinking too highly of myself or my skills, overrating... rasting itself, whatever. But on the other hand, what's never EVER changed in all these years is the pain I feel when I lose. Well, sometimes it's not that bad, but those opportunities are extremely rare for me.
Why is this such a big deal? How could it not be, for Christ's sake! It's pain, and it's real! D'ya know, on my 18th birthday I completely outplayed my opponent as White in a French KIA, only to mess up the order of the moves in the final combination and lose. This devastated me so much that (and rest assured I F-ING kid you not) mere minutes later I got such a fever that I had to go and immediately take an injection at a hospital to be restored to my usually healthy state!
You'd think that after such an experience, just about anyone would quit chess. But I believe that most of you reading this are probably familiar with a chess addiction or two by now, and in this light I must say that I'm also aware that this perceived inferiority which pains us so much IS what makes us go forward, pushes us to constantly improve, perhaps more than anything else.
So what's the problem, then? Well, the emotional damage (or rather, emotional experience) we recieve when we lose a game not only puts our self-control to the test, but also lasts longer than we'd like it to... or at least longer than I'd like it to. I actually started typing this down yesterday, but after having had to restart my PC due to an error, I thought this text hadn't been saved at all. Somewhat fortunately, I was wrong, because now that the maelstrom of my emotional turmoil has gone away (or subsided?), I can confirm that I still do remember how I felt yesterday. Not only did I mutilate my computer mouse in pure anguish just a few minutes after the game (well, actually, it's just a bit harder for me to perform the left click now, but the rest's completely unscathed xD), but I also kept experiencing immense anger, followed by a clearer sense of helplessness and sadness, for the next few hours. It was PARALYSING.
I know that such outbursts happen even to some of the greatest chessplayers (Ivanchuk immediately comes to mind, he is completely obviously a HSP just like me), but is that the best we (or a select few of us) can do? Can we not have both an almost murderous instinctual flair for chess AND inner peace?
The only thing I've heard of so far is that if I don't supress my anger, I'll get angry about less devastating things more easily (and that probably includes better losses of chess games), but it won't be as explosive. If you've got any advice for me, fire away, and as always, thank you all so much in advance!