Playing chess is stressful. Not just each individual game, but the activity as a whole. Many grandmasters noted that those who take chess seriously typically end up less happy overall because of it. This aspect has even been documented and closely examined in the “Chess Improvement: It’s all in the mindset” book by Barry Hymer and Peter Wells. Chess is highly competitive and aggressive. After all, the objet is to impose your will on the opponent and, figuratively speaking, destroy them. Winning is riddled with psychological traps like impostor syndrome and attributing your successes to luck, and losing is simply devastating for the ego and motivation.
One way to side-step this pitfall is to consider chess not as a finite game (the object being to end the game as quickly as possibly by checkmating the opponent’s king), but as an infinite one (played to keep the game going indefinitely), to borrow the terminology from James P. Carse, the author of “Finite and Infinite Games“. So if you play to keep improving, rather than to win matches, you’ll feel better.
Research in education shows that In order to improve at anything (chess, mathematics, art, kendo, etc.) it is important to engage with the activity on a regular basis. The good news is that it doesn’t matter how exactly you engage with it, at least at the beginning and intermediate levels. In other words, if you do anything related to chess – solve puzzles, read books, watch instructional videos and even lose some games – you will be getting better by improving your understanding of strategic principles and tactical sense. Whatever you do – it will lead to improvement, even though it might not be the most efficient route. Of course, quality od practice matters too, not just quantity. Nut nobody really knows what the most efficient route is, so it is all fine anyway – almost anything you do would be better than nothing.
