In my last entry, I wrote about last year’s Western States Open, where I went 4-2, won a nice chunk of change, and played the best game of my life. This year… well, it was a different story. I drew three games, lost three, and didn’t win a single one. That gave me a woeful score of 1 1/2 – 4 1/2.
It’s difficult to write about a disaster like this without lapsing into self-pity, which I refuse to do because I know that no one wants to read it. So let me try to draw some kind of positive lesson from the experience.
The difference between last year and this year was all about one word: confidence. I had it last year. In that historic game against David Pruess, I was in complete control from beginning to end. For the first and only time in my life, I had some inkling of how grandmasters must feel every day. The pieces (even my opponent’s pieces!) were totally at my command.
This year, though, my confidence meter hit zero. It’s a vicious circle. First I make some bad moves, and I start to worry. Next game, I’m double-checking and triple-checking my analysis (a huge waste of time, as you can read in Think Like a Grandmaster by Alexander Kotov). That gets me in time pressure, and leads to more mistakes. The second-guessing also causes mistakes even without the time pressure, because I talk myself out of natural, simple moves and play unintuitive and usually inferior moves instead.
The last two games in Reno were especially discouraging. In round five, I probably had a slight advantage after 28 moves, when my opponent offered a draw. At that point I had only 14 minutes left to make 12 moves, and my opponent had about an hour. I no longer had any faith in myself, so I cravenly accepted his offer. In the last round, I actually did play with confidence for about 15 moves, because it was an opening that I knew. But suddenly, over the course of just two or three moves, I lost the thread of the position. From then on, I was just too tired, too confused, too burned out to put up much of a fight.
In truth, this crisis of confidence has been building for some time. This fall I set myself a very ambitious challenge — to play in three master-class tournaments in a little more than a month. Out of 14 games (11 of them against masters), I lost 10, drew three, and enjoyed a single solitary victory. When you’re getting hammered over and over again, it’s easy to get discouraged. Even when you have a good position, you’re playing scared and wondering what might go wrong. And when your position actually does start to go downhill, the voices in your head are saying, “Here we go again.”
I didn’t want to begin my blog this way. I wanted to write about another glorious triumph. But now the chess teacher needs your help. How can I get my groove back?
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