Tournaments Are the Worst

Here's why you should still play in them

You manage to take the whole weekend off. You pay for travel. You pay for the hotel. It’s not a nice hotel. There’s nowhere to eat, but you don’t have time to eat anyway. Your sleep schedule gets all messed up. Your opponent is a kid with questionable hygiene. Your opponent is an adult with questionable hygiene. You lose a game you were winning. You make a move so stupid that it raises new and troubling questions about your mental competency.

Stephanie Mitchell

Tournaments are brutal, but they’re one of the best ways to get better at chess. Why? One word: focus. Over-the-board tournaments allow you to focus much more intently and for a longer period of time than you could otherwise.

At least, they do for me. If you can call up four hours of uninterrupted focus on demand, more power to you. I can’t, so I need a tournament environment to pull it out of me. If you’ve given any thought to cultivating focus, you’ve probably noticed that exerting more willpower moment-to-moment is not an effective strategy. What works better is arranging your environment in advance to eliminate distractions. As uncomfortable as they can be, chess tournaments actually provide an incredibly well-engineered environment for cultivating focus.

Let me draw a comparison with something I like to do when I’m not playing chess, cooking. The boiling point of water is 212°F. That means it’s literally impossible to cook something wet, like a stew, above 212° no matter how high you turn up the burner. If you pour in more energy you’ll boil off water faster, but you won’t make the stew any hotter. To do that you need a pressure cooker. A pressure cooker seals in steam, increasing the pressure inside, which in turns raises the boiling point of the liquid. This allows you to actually get it hotter and cook things faster.

Trying to increase your focus in the wrong context is like turning up the burner on an uncovered pot. It seems like it should work, but the energy you pour in just ends up escaping in other ways. A chess tournament is a pressure cooker, but instead of producing higher heat, it enables higher focus. In fact, a tournament exerts three kinds of pressure, all of which are conducive to focus. First, competitive pressure: you are sitting across from someone you want to beat; Second, time pressure: the ticking clock; Third, social pressure: you’re in a room where everyone is silent and also focusing. Any of these individually would be quite effective for increasing your ability to focus, but together they play off each other and increase your focus exponentially.

If a pressure cooker environment sounds intense… Well, yes, it is. Playing in a tournament does not necessarily feel pleasant while you’re doing it. But it can feel good - once it’s over, maybe - to find that you’re capable of focusing intently for many hours at a time. It might even lead you to rethink what’s possible in your civilian life. 

It would have made for a good conclusion to this post to share how many 1-minute games I started while writing it, but I didn’t think of that until just now. Anyway, it was a lot. It’s amazing that, after all the abuse I’ve thrown at it, my brain can still focus for hours at a time given the right environment. It makes you wonder what else is possible.