How To Deal With Tilt

This week, I’m plowing ahead with my October rating challenge. As of this writing, I’m at 2699 Chess.com blitz, which is 77 points ahead of where I was when I started my rating challenge, but 18 points short of surpassing my goal, beating my all-time high rating of 2716. For a while, almost all the points I gained came from one guy.

I usually don’t accept rematches, but when he instantly challenged me after losing a game where he played rather poorly, I sensed an opportunity to make some progress on my goal. I ended up beating him ten games in a row, gaining 50+ points in the process. I perhaps could have farmed this guy all the way up to my goal, but a clean “adoption” (10-0) seemed like more than enough.

Cynical? Maybe, but it’s in service of a good cause. Alex Botez pledged to donate $1000 if I complete my goal, which I’m planning to direct to the Women in Chess foundation. And anyway, it was nice for once to be the beneficiary of tilt, having been victimized by it so many times.

When chess players talk about tilt – a term that originated in poker – they tend to think of the most extreme examples. Flipping the table, slamming keyboards, breaking mouses, etc. What we might call “stone cold monkey tilt.”

But for poker players, there is a whole taxonomy of tilt, ranging from anger to boredom to even being happy about losing. Any state of mind that prevents you from playing your best game could be considered tilt. But the big question is, what do you do about it?

My friend Benji Portheault, who helped the British team with their mental preparation in the last chess Olympiad, had an interesting suggestion about using scheduling to avoid tilt: play until you lose, then stop.

It’s human nature to want to win. In poker, this causes many players to play longer when winning to try to get back to even, and quit sooner when winning to lock up the win. Unfortunately, this is exactly the opposite of what you should do. It’s when you’re winning that conditions are most likely to be in your favor – you’re playing well and feeling confident – and you should play for longer. Similarly, when things aren’t going your way, cutting your losses may be the best decision.

Benji’s play-until-you-lose rule helps address this mistake. If you play until you lose, you’ll naturally play longer sessions when you’re winning. It’s also fun to try to put together a long winning streak.

While this is a great strategy, it’s not the one I’m using in my blitz challenge. For now, I simply play a fixed number of games, usually four, and review them. Knowing the number of games in advance makes it easier to block blitz into my schedule. In the long run, I also think it’s healthy to play the same number of games every day. It reinforces the idea that it’s not really about winning or losing, it’s about playing consistently

Of course, if you’re playing an OTB tournament, you won’t be able to determine your own schedule. In that case, you can try adjusting your mindset. One of the most powerful tools for combatting tilt is respecting your opponents. Think about it: if you are facing a worthy opponent, there is nothing embarrassing about losing to them. At the same time, of course, you can’t give your opponent too much respect on a move-for-move basis: you still need to ruthlessly interrogate all their moves. This is about a more fundamental kind of respect, acknowledging that your opponent has as much right to sit at the table and win as you do.

Curiosity for the game is another great defense against tilt. If it’s all about winning, you’ll always be angry when you lose, which for most players will happen about half the time. But if you are truly interested in the intricacies of chess, you can find something satisfying in every game.

These mindset strategies might sound corny, but even if you don’t care about becoming a more content or compassionate person, I really do believe they will help your competitive results. Until next time, may your opponents be the ones who are on tilt.