It’s been an up and down Sunday evening… I’ve been playing chess on “PlayChess” - the Chessbase online chess site. I won a game, and lost a game.
The most annoying thing was that I was winning the game I lost. As I type this, Fritz is busy chugging through the game figuring out what I did that was really stupid (Fritz is a very good chess program that can play normally, but can also go through your games and put comments and alternative moves in for you to look at).
It’s weird really - even though I have a pretty stellar record playing chess at work, little do they know that I’m continually putting myself up against far better opposition on the internet, and getting routinely clobbered
Chess is at times a fantastic game, and a terrible game. In “John Nash” terms, it’s a zero-sum game. You have perfect information, and you could (in theory) work the result out from the start… except of course the available moves in a chess game is a very large number indeed (some brainy git has figured it out to be about 30 digits long, or something like that). The annoying this for the average joe like you or I playing chess is that we have trouble seeing more than a move or two ahead…
Perhaps practice will make me a better player eventually. Until then I guess I have to keep pitching myself against better players and swallowing the defeats… I suppose the fact that I take the defeats so badly is a good thing - it makes me try that much harder.