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BGonline.org Forums
Which is more aggravating & why?
Posted By: Matt Cohn-Geier In Response To: Which is more aggravating & why? (Stanley E. Richards)
Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2008, at 5:51 p.m.
Consider that Jason's post is not all that far from reality.
At 24, I think I am by far the youngest player on the board, outdoing Stick by several years. Maybe Darren can compete with me. At this point, I will almost certainly never be a world class chess player, because I am already too old.
At one point, I studied chess for 8-12 hours per day, every day. I began to dream in chess. I don't think I can adequately describe what that means to someone who hasn't played chess, but it is more than mildly unpleasant.
To put that kind of effort into a game and still lose is frustrating, to say the least. I probably would have obtained master if I had kept it up, and possibly an IM or GM title, but I would never ever have kept pace with someone like Carlsen. I've beaten masters many times before, but GMs would consistently crush me without breaking a sweat.
Consider that you could play a tournament consisting of 7 games in 3 days--potentially as much as 42 hours of play in the course of a weekend--and miss winning it because your concentration broke for one move. In chess, games are won or lost by these tiny details. Average, casual players try to keep them all in mind once they're confronted with them, which doesn't work. World class players already know everything, so they can spend a second or two on a position and make a better decision than an amateur who studied the position for a day. Aspiring young hopefuls like me (in my teenage days) try to study the game so that they can one day become world class. To put all that effort into a game, to realize that you studied this game for years and put forth your best effort, and yet lose (and worst of all, to lose to someone who is much weaker than you because you made a huge, stupid mistake) is frustrating.
But I am backwards rationalizing, really. All I know is that when I was playing chess, winning felt really, really good (particularly if my opponent was better than me), and losing felt really, really bad (particularly if my opponent was worse than me). Playing backgammon, I don't get those surges of positive or negative emotion. Yes, it sucks when someone turns around a position they had a 3% chance of winning and you lose a gammon on an 8 cube. But does it suck as much as losing $4000 because you made one blunder in an entire weekend of play?
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