Why Can Chess Feel So Personal and Painful to Lose At?

(see thread title)

Is it a kind of psychological/emotional immaturity of the player? 

I've gotten better at losing, but it can still "hurt."  ...But, thankfully, I enjoy the fun and challenge of it more and don't care as much about the "pain" of losing.  But it can feel painful at times. 

Partly because when you lose or blunder there's no one to blame but yourself.  There are no cards, or dice, or anything like that.  And when your position is worse it means not only did you screw up, but your opponent sees your mistake(s) and is proving it... and that can be a bit painful.  Nice to know it happens to all of us.  For example I love watching the Candidates tournament going on now and seeing those super GMs get crappy positions and occasionally lose   /schadenfreude

Because people wrongly believe that chess results are a reflection of their intelligence.

Personally I have no problem losing. And it's not because I don't care about chess because I do (I spend most of my free time with it). It's just that I learn from my mistakes and the only thing that matters for me is the long term improvements, not the immediate victories.

Having said that I was a bit upset last tournament because I lost on time from a winning position (i.e. a piece ahead). Well, that teaches me to move faster.

If 7-year-old children can cope with the pain of losing, I'm sure we can as well.

I actually admire this, I remember one of my pupils lost the 1st place in a regional tournament (125 U-8 children) in the last round. It was his first time in a tournament. He didn't want to look me in the eye, as he thought I was disappointed. He was holding back the tears. Then the organiser of the tournament came up to him, and talked to him and his parents for about 5 minutes. When they came back, his parents were very happy, but he wasn't, he only wanted to get revenge.

I think maybe pride or self-worth are involved too.  If a person places is worth in a game or has tremendous pride in his abilities, then those can be shattered by losses. 

I don't know.  I don't get that down, but I do get more noticeably down than when playing physical sports.  I wonder why that is.  I may lose a basketball game, but I don't know if I've ever felt the same kind of pain. 

ONly once maybe did I feel anything close to this feeling I have with chess.

That's true.  It's a one on one match.  YOu can blame teammates....

lol...I need to watch some GM games!!!  REcomend any?  Do they show pain in their faces?  lol.  That'd be funny in a "oh, you're human too!" kind of way perhaps.  ....maybe I'm just trying to find something to make me feel better atm  lol. 

GM totally feel pain and may even get into depression for a loss...

but it's their career: only source of livelihood and personal fulfilment.

For an amatuer getting upset for a loss it's ridiculous.

Yes.  In the press conference afterwards usually the one who lost or failed to win their winning position are visibly frustrated.  The ones who lost look shell shocked.

It's heartening for me to remember even professionals have gut wrenching losses due to stupid blunders.  Kasparov - Radjabov 2003 is a good example.  Kaspaorv, a dominant world champion who is winning nearly every top tournament has the white pieces no less vs the 15 year old Radjabov... already a GM but much weaker than Kasparov.  Kasparov is winning too... so much so Radjabov gets desperate and sacs a knight in a lost position.  Thinking he's avoiding unnecessary complications Kasparov doesn't take the knight, and goes on to lose the game!  To add insult to injury they give Radjabov the brilliancy prize of the tournament for the game!  An infuriated Kasparov grabs the mic and rants about how Radjabov doesn't deserve it.  I'm sure games like this are remembered and loathed far longer than whatever loss you may have had :)

Read below (from here)

"Several eyewitnesses have described the scene of the closing ceremony. The prize for most beautiful game was announced with Teimour Radjabov the winner for his win over Garry Kasparov in round two. Kasparov stunned the crowd by immediately rising and walking to the stage and speaking into the microphone: "How could you give the beauty prize to a game in which I lost a piece because of a stupid mistake? It has been selected only because it was the only game that I lost and I consider this to be a public insult and humiliation." (The wording will vary as we have only the recollections from several non-native English speakers and we have re-translated their commentary back into English.)

Kasparov then approached a group of journalists, including GM Ian Rogers of Australia and Spanish writer Leontxo Garcia, and asked them who they had voted for and shouted: "This is the greatest insult that you have done to me in my life! It is an insult to me and to chess. You consider yourself chess journalists? If you think that this was the most beautiful game in Linares, you are damaging chess with your reports and articles. Radjabov was completely lost in that game." Kasparov then stormed out with his mother and trainer."

Well Waffle..why do you keep it sooo difficult always to disagree with your clever views ever??...very nicely put (ever).

I would say it's because you only have yourself to blame if you lose.

Ask Reuben Fine:

^

Also chess is a game of domination. Particularly mental domination.

I only get angry for the loss of time after a game where I was defeated. I don't believe being miserable in Chess stands in relation with your intelligence level. After I lose, I'll take on a new challenge and hopefully I've learned something out of my defeat.

Or global domination.

Don't think of bad moves as blunders.

Think of them as happy little accidents.

Helps 100%. 

This topic is one I find interesting since I gave up playing regular chess and especially turn-based chess years ago for this very reason.  Chess requires a certain investment of one's self.  The longer the game, it seems, the greater the investment,  that is, if winning is all-important to you - and if it isn't, then there seems no point in playing that sort of game.  Losing after having put forth one's best effort - that's is concentrating on nothing else and examining every detail one can find, over and over, following lines that are obvious and one's not so obvious in as many sub-lines as one can imagine until the move is found that seems to satisfy all contingencies and which still poses a problem for one's opponent, and doing this over and over for 40- 50 moves - only to find one's self in an untenable position - is hard to take and harder to endure game after game, as sometimes happens.  The investment is great and the payback is nil.  Winning isn't so satisfying either since one expects to win and it doesn't have that unexpected thrill, at least not in comparison from the unexpected jolt when one finds her carefully crafted idea suddenly refuted.

Shorter games make losing less important because one puts less of one's self into such games and actually makes winning more fun since wins often come out of the blue with some unexpected sacrifice or with some seeminly impossible move.

Losing at long games doesn't arouse in me anger as much as it does deep depression and I tend to think it isn't a matter of chess as much as it is competition itself.

This reminds me of what Pruess said about how he couldn't play CC games because then he would keep on thinking about them all the time.  As for me, winning positions don't generally obsess me but the losing ones definitely can do so. 

This oddly enough reminds me of a statement Averbakh made about the reason he never quite made it to the tippy-top of the chess world:  that he would be plunged into the depths of despair by a loss, but that for him there was no corresponding sense of ineffable elation when he won.

He said this btw not in a chess book but in a volume I used to have which interviewed a lot of Russian folks at random (and one of them was him).

Noooooooo, don't ask Reuben Fine (besides, he's dead). Fine's psychological ideas will mess you up worse than losing.

Pruess and Averbakh really need to stop stealing my thoughts.