Winning the Paragame
When I returned to tournament chess after a long break, two things were immediately clear to me.
Chess is hard. Really, really hard. Much harder than anything in my “civilian” life. This was both exhilarating and exhausting. It felt good to see what I could do if I exerted myself to the fullest, to have that kind of effort pulled out of me. At the same time, it was hard to see how I could fit that level of exertion into my life on a regular basis.
In terms of pure chess strength, I was better than my rating (high 2200s when I came back). In postmortems with opponents around 2300, it was clear that I had seen and understood more during the game, but this understanding did not always translate to better results.
If I had to sum up the level of chess ability I inherited from my childhood, I’d say I was good at chess and bad at life. Thousands of hours immersed in chess had endowed me with the ability to recognize strategic ideas, find good candidate moves, and calculate variations. But when it came to getting ready to play, recovering from losses, or planning my training time, I really didn’t have a clue.
I realized that in order to leverage my chess ability, those were the things I needed to work on. As a result, I became fascinated with what I’ll call the paragame - all the things around a chess game that aren’t directly related to chess per se. (I would have called it the metagame, but that word has a specific meaning in chess that’s not really what I’m talking about.) Years of playing poker for a living had also prepared me to see chess from a pragmatic perspective, more like a sport than a purely intellectual exercise. I was concerned less about finding the “best” moves and more about setting myself up for success.
In emphasizing these things, I realize there’s a risk of falling into one of the cardinal sins of coaching: teaching what’s good for me, not what’s good for you. As a result of those thousands of childhood hours immersed in chess, when I look at a position, usually a move pops into my head, and usually it’s a pretty good move. Now I’ve read my share of chess books, so I can retcon a pretty convincing explanation of why I played that move, but the truth is that my brain’s process for finding moves is largely opaque to me. Some moves look good and other moves look bad.
If you didn’t spend thousands of hours playing chess as a kid, your experience of chess is going to be a lot different than mine. You won’t have that chess operating system running in the background of your brain. You’re going to have to do all the usual things to get good at chess - practice tactics, go over master games, play a lot of games. Nonetheless, I still think there’s a lot of hay to be made in the paragame. This is an area most chess players don’t seem to be thinking about right now, and there’s no reason not to develop good habits around chess competition, regardless of your chess level. So here are three suggestions for mastering the paragame.
Play Tournaments Regularly
A lot of players approach tournaments like a museum robbery: sneak in, grab a few rating points, and escape before anyone notices. This usually doesn’t work. While in theory you could choose to play tournaments only when you’re “on form,” in practice you’re unlikely to get to this level of confidence just by waiting around. You don’t get on form by chance, you play yourself into form. Tournaments aren’t where you prove how good you already are, they’re where you get good. The intensity and focus that come with a tournament game are very hard to replicate outside of that context.
Furthermore, you should schedule your tournaments in advance. Pay the early entry fee. Put them on your calendar. Seeing them on the calendar will motivate you to prepare.
If you really want to get better at chess, you need to make tournaments a regular part of your routine. Play tournaments regularly with no particular expectation except that you’ll get challenging games and opportunities to learn. As you improve, the rating points will take care of themselves.
Play All the Rounds
There’s something that players do regularly in the Boston area that absolutely blows my mind: they register for a tournament, convince their partner to watch the kids, drive to the venue, lose one game… and quit the tournament. This is crazy! If you’re at the tournament, you’ve already paid the costs to play. Not just the entry fee, which is usually manageable, but the opportunity cost of not doing something else that day. You should definitely play all the rounds!
Now if you’ve lost the three worst games of your life back-to-back-to-back and you need to withdraw to preserve what’s left of your psyche, I can understand that. But this should be a once-in-a-few-years thing, not your regular response to losing a single game. I believe your actions send messages to your brain and over time your brain will pick up on those messages. If you regularly withdraw from tournaments on account of losing a single game, you’re sending a message to your brain that you’re too fragile to deal with a loss.
Exactly how upset it’s ideal to be after a loss is an interesting question. The chess coach Dan Heisman has an interesting theory that a key trait of strong chess players is disliking losing an appropriate amount. If you really don’t mind losing at all, you won’t have any incentive to get better. If you hate losing too much, you’ll find it debilitating and may even quit chess.
In fact, dealing with losing is one of the hardest parts of chess, and does cause many players to quit. There aren’t many activities we pour as much of our heart and soul into as chess, so losing is especially painful. It can be helpful to remind yourself that losing is an essential step towards improving. And if you won every game, what sort of accomplishment would that be? It would only mean you’re not seeking out strong enough opponents.
Develop a Pregame Ritual
Your pregame ritual doesn’t need to be complicated, but I think you should have one. It could be as simple as going for a short walk outside or meditating for a few minutes. Do whatever works for you, but if you do the same thing consistently it will help you to be calm and focused for your game.
One pregame ritual I find especially unhelpful: frantically researching opening lines. This seems to be the standard routine for many players. Find out who your opponent is, check their games, try to learn some opening line to use against them. I’ve even been guilty of this myself many times. But I started to notice something: the line I researched almost never appeared on the board. Even if it did, the stress of trying to learn a line right before the game wasn’t worth the knowledge I gained.
If you want, you can quickly check your opponent’s games so you can choose which line to use. But notice I say choose, not learn. Attempting to learn a new line in a few minutes never works. Sometimes, the stress of a tournament situation will expose some hole in your opening repertoire that you had been unaware of or unconcerned about at home. For cases like these, I like to have a notebook with me where I write things to address before the next tournament. Writing it down seems to help me let myself off the hook for any issues with my repertoire, knowing I have a reminder to deal with them, and focus on doing the best I can with the repertoire I have right now.
Chess improvement is a long process. For better or worse, the preparation you start the tournament with is the preparation you have for that tournament. During the tournament, make peace with the preparation you have and focus on using it as well as you can. The time to improve your preparation is after this tournament and before the next one.