How to Recover from a Bad Loss in Chess
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and I help chess players train deliberately with what I call the Simplified Chess Improvement System. Deliberate chess players live by three rules. Do what matters. Do it well and do it consistently. If you're tired of training randomly and want to follow a simple, proven system, this podcast is for you.

So I very often get the question, how can I recover from a bad loss? It is everywhere. I get it via email. I get it in the Simplified Chess Improvement System community. And it's [00:01:00] something I've struggled with as well for a long time in my chess career. So today I wanna talk about one way, and this is like a hack.

This is not a long-term mindset improvement, but this is like something that you can use in the moment when you feel that a loss is super painful. And it's a technique I learned with my sports psychologist. It's a technique I call zooming out. And I just want to share how painful losses for me were, how this zooming out technique works and then three different applications of this zooming out technique.

And maybe you'll find one for yourself that can help you zoom out and make the losses a little bit less painful. As I mentioned, in my chess career, I've really suffered a lot from bad results, especially early in my career. Just when I turned a professional player [00:02:00] 2015, I was only 19 years old. I was really, really obsessed about my result, and a lot of my identity was tied to my chess results.

So often, if I'd lose a game in an important tournament, I would really ask myself very, very profound and deep questions. I would think, I've worked for this for years. I blunder all away. Was it for nothing? Should I stop? It always felt like my whole life depended on some chess results, and that's really painful.

Especially in important tournaments. In tournaments I thought were the peak of my career up to then. I was super stressed because of that, because the more painful a certain loss is, the more anxiety I had in the future, because I wanted to avoid that pain at all costs. So I knew I'd had to do something about it. And I [00:03:00] started to work with a sports psychologist and we talked about many different things. 

But today I just wanna talk about this one single reframe or this one thing that helped me a lot, which was zooming out. So one thing that Robbie showed me very, very clearly is that one thing we try to do when losses are so painful is to avoid them, and this is not a very effective strategy, especially in a game as difficult as chess, and especially if you're not called Magnus Carlsen. If you're the best in the world, well, maybe you can just try to avoid losses. If they are super painful or after a loss, you're just saying, okay, I'll win the next game.

But sometimes chess is not as easy, and sometimes it's really difficult and painful, and for most of us, losses are just part of the process. We can't avoid them. And so this is not an effective strategy. So the strategy that I [00:04:00] tried working on is like, what do I do once a loss is happening? How can I be not as unenjoyable to be next to when I lose a game or not as frustrated and bring it into my whole life?

So after bad tournament, I would just feel bad for a week or two because I felt like, well, everything I've worked for didn't make sense anymore. So how can I zoom out, be able to see the big picture and see, okay, chess is just a part. This is what makes chess so powerful and so interesting, but also what makes it so painful.

If you've played over-the-board chess, you might have had that experience already, but even online, chess sometimes can give you this experience that when you play chess, when you play tournament or a few games, it feels like chess is everything in your life. There is nothing else than chess at this very moment.

So when you lose at chess, it feels like you've lost everything there is, right? So the strategy that Röbbi told me to use is [00:05:00] to be able to see that actually, chess is not everything, so you haven't lost everything. If you realize that chess is not everything, and one of the things that can help is zooming out.

So basically just widening in the lens on my own life and seeing, okay, chess is not the only thing I have in my life. So even if I lost at it, I'm still the same guy. I still have the same relationships. It's all okay. So this zooming out technique really got a big part of my life because when I would just go to a tournament without this technique, it was very easy to be there, mostly alone as a professional chess player and for a few days or a week, more than a week. Sometimes tournaments go like 12, 14 days. For all of these days, I felt chess was the only thing I had, so I needed a reminder to zoom out and to use that zooming out to understand, okay, chess is not everything I have.[00:06:00] 

And I wrote in the past about three different methods that I used for zooming out. The most recent one I shared on my newsletter is a very personal one. I watched a specific film on tournaments that went very, very bad, and it somehow helped me to reframe and see, okay, chess is not everything I have. So this film is called Honig im Kopf.

It later got remade also in English. It wasn't as much of a success in English, but it's called Head Full of Honey. And it's basically a story of an elder gentleman that has Alzheimer's disease and his granddaughter is trying to help him to have fun and just to go on an experience with him.

It's a very touching story. And for me it was very touching because my grandmother at the time suffered from dementia and then also when I was a chess professional, sadly passed away. So this [00:07:00] was a very emotional, kind of re-triggering for my brain to understand, okay, when I watch this film, chess is not everything.

There are things that are so much more important than chess. So watching this film was like a reminder to myself, to zoom out, to understand, okay, this was just a game. I lost it. No matter how important chess for me is, there are way more important things. So this became so important to me that I even bought a copy, A DVD of this film, even though nowadays you can just go online and watch any film.

So I bought a DVD so I could bring it to tournaments and physically have somewhere as a reminder. Even just looking at it could help to trigger, okay, wait a moment. There are more important things. And then also watching it at the tournament was really the last resort effort. When I really, really felt bad about my chess that I could watch this and then feel better.[00:08:00] 

And it's not generally like feeling better about my chess, but just understanding that chess is a small part of my life, no matter it's still my profession. Yes, my livelihood might depend on in everything, but still, ultimately, life is about more things than just performing well at chess. That, for me, was super, super helpful.

A second trigger I've written about in the past was that I read a book named Man's Search for Meaning. I can wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone. It's a short read. It's a very intense read because it's written by someone who suffered from the Holocaust during the Second World War, who was in Nazi detention camp, and survived this and talks about his ability to control his reaction to the actions.

So even suffering there. He said that [00:09:00] what nobody can take away from him is how he reacts to what happens to him. And when somebody in such a situation is able to write that, I was like, well, I lost the game. I can control how I react to losing this game. So this was a different way of just zooming out and seeing, okay, in this moment when I just think about chess and myself, I feel so much, oh, this is the most important thing that happens in the world today. My world is breaking down. Everything is shit. And then I re-read this story, this book, and I was like. Well, yeah, I think there are way more difficult moments to go through and if this person, if Viktor Frankl is able to say that, that he was able to control his reaction.

Then who am I to not control my reaction of losing a board game that I chose, that I love, that I wanted to make my profession? Come on. So this was another way zooming out, changing my perspective, not being so much indulged [00:10:00] in my own stuff. And then there is a third way I've written about in the past as well, and goes down exactly the same rabbit hole.

I just want to give you different tools that you might be able to use yourself. And so this third different tool is writing a letter to myself. It's basically the same idea again when I'm at home. Well, when I was still playing, when I was at home, I would realize, okay, chess is not everything I have, there are more important things.

So in that state of mind, I would write myself a letter basically. Thinking about all the things that I would think on a tournament when I would lose a game, and then telling from Noël with better perspective, well, it's not actually like that. So I'd write a letter to myself saying, Hey, I understand you're super frustrated, but da, da da, da da. Understand that this is a game. Yes, it's your profession, but you wanna do your best and losses are part of the game. You will get back from [00:11:00] it. You've come back from even more difficult moments in your chess career and so on. So this was a personalized letter to myself, basically expecting that I would feel super bad.

And having the letter written already with less emotional brain and just more rational and observing brain helped me to get myself out of this misery and of this feeling, oh, I'm so sad. I'm such a poor guy. Why does this always happen to me? Only me, me, me, me, me only chess, chess, chess, chess. And so I managed to see the bigger picture and get back. This wider lens chess is not so important. Okay, let's do my best. I'll survive this. It'll be fine. 

So these were three ways that helped me a lot achieve the same goal, basically from being in chess and being all "chess is everything I have, and it's so important and I just lost and it sucks so much, and why did I blunder", to bring [00:12:00] myself to have a wider lens and say, "okay, this is more part of my life. It's not as important as I think right now. There are things that matter much more. I had such a moment already. I got out of it. Let's do my best. Let's not be as upset about this one single game or one single tournament."

And I just wanna share one huge upside for you guys sitting at home or wherever you are at the moment listening to this is: 99.999% of my audience is not just professionals. Chess is a hobby for you. So as a reminder from myself to you is if you compare your situation to mine, you even have way bigger advantages because your finances don't depend on your results.

So it's really unimportant of how you score in chess. Chess is a hobby, not profession. It's not something you spend [00:13:00] eight hours a day training and obsessing about. And what sometimes can be negative, but also positive, is that your closest friends and family might not even care at all about your chess results.

So they might not even realize if you have a high rating or not. And that's a nice thing because they don't take you as the chess player, but they take you as the person you are. When you have a difficult loss, when you're going through a difficult tournament, the clue is, or one of the ways to make it less painful, is to realize that chess is only a small part of your life.

It doesn't define who you are. It never will. It doesn't define if you're smart or stupid, just how you play this one single game. And when you manage to zoom out, you will realize that, okay, I can get through this. This is not as important as I thought it was. This is not as hard as I thought it was, and there are way more difficult [00:14:00] moments in my life, in other people's life and way more important things.

So I can relax just a little bit. And if you want to use the same technique, there's this one thing that you need to be very aware of. Using this technique in the moment when you already feel like shit is probably not going to work, so you need to prepare for it. So if you take all the three methods I told today, they have in common that I prepared something for the moment when I feel bad. It wasn't in the moment. I magically feel different, but I prepared myself. So I bought a DVD, brought it to the tournament. I saw the film and maybe it got me to watch the film or I just thought about the film and it was like, oh yeah. Oh, I remember. 

Second, I had a book. I bought that book. I had that with me on a tournament again. So book was a reminder. Again, the third thing, I wrote a letter to myself, not in the moment of feeling bad, but [00:15:00] beforehand again, I brought it with me. So if you are suffering a lot from difficult losses in chess, do something. 

Think about what helps you zoom out pretty quickly. Might be even a song, it might be a person, it might be a picture of you and your kids or whatever it is. That's, for example something that one of my students did, is just have a picture of his kids with him on chess tournaments and it was like, oh, this is so bad. This is whatever. 

Looking at the kids, okay, whatever. Why do I even care about this chess result? So something personal to you that can help you bring you out of this mental loop of this is so bad, this is horrible. This is all I have, chess, chess, chess, chess, chess. And then you will be able to suffer way less to enjoy hopefully the next games, to enjoy the evening after that game and to just live a more happy chess life and the less painful [00:16:00] chess experience.

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