How Do You Stop Caring About Rating?

Imagine a world where everyone has a number tattooed on their forehead. In this world, the number is very important: it determines status, opportunities, even internal sense of worth. Only you know a secret. The number isn’t what it seems. It is subject to random chance and the calculations behind it don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. Nonetheless, you still have a number on your forehead.

Knowing what you know, will you be able to shake free of the tyranny of the number? Perhaps you will when you’re at home by yourself. But as soon as you leave the house, it’s obvious that many people care deeply about the number. They point to your forehead, make comments about your number, and treat you differently depending on how high or low it is. No matter how clear you are internally about the emptiness of the number, it will be nearly impossible to avoid caring about it for long.

All this talk about numbers on foreheads is, of course, a thinly veiled metaphor for ratings in chess. There is lots of advice about dealing with ratings: don’t worry about it, enjoy chess for its own sake, and if increasing your rating is a goal, focus on becoming a stronger chess player. All this advice is obviously correct, but not very helpful. You may understand it very well, but as soon as you go outside with that number on your forehead you’ll be swept along with everyone else.

The real question is how do you create and maintain a healthier relationship with your rating? I don’t have any silver bullets – I still struggle with how I think about my own rating – but I have three suggestions that I’ve found helpful.

1. Recognize that maintaining a healthy attitude toward rating is an ongoing process. You’re probably not going to have a blinding epiphany that leaves you immune to the charms of rating for the rest of your life. The importance that the chess world at large places on ratings will always draw you back in. For that reason, you’ll have to periodically readjust your relationship with your rating. It’s a skill you need to work on continuously, like calculation.

2. Focus on process goals above outcome goals. An example of an outcome goal is, “I will hit 1800 by the end of the year.” A process goal would be, “I will do calculation exercises for half an hour twice a week.” The advantage of process goals is they keep you focused on the key actions you can control. The path your rating takes is not entirely under your control: your opponents might perform above or below their level, you might have bad tournaments even if you’ve prepared well, and so on. But you can control whether or not you have a sensible plan and follow it. The scientific literature seems to support the idea that process goals are more effective. In some cases, setting a rating goal can provide a boost of motivation, and that can work for some people. But always work backwards from your rating goal to figure out the daily process goals that would be necessary to achieve it, then focus on those. And if the rating goal is creating unnecessary pressure, don’t be afraid to drop it.

3. Cultivate your curiosity. Back when I played poker, I knew some players who tried to make themselves into robots, the idea being that if you remove emotion from the game you’d make every decision rationally. This is a trap. You can’t get rid of emotion – it’s closely tied up in everything you think and do – but if you could, that would be a very bad thing, because emotion is also very important for decision making. What you can do is tie your emotions to processes and goals that are more aligned with your long-term well-being. In chess, I seem to be the most happy and have the best results when I am most curious about the game itself: So when you are unhappy with your rating, don’t ask yourself, “How could I increase my rating?” Instead ask, “How could I get more curious about chess?”