This post is about about responding to failure.
Last night was round 3 of the NPCC August chess tournament.
- Round 1 – I played a 16 year old and lost a close game which I was totally fine with.
- Round 2 – I played a 7 year old and beat him because he was fucking 7 years old.
- Last night – I played Rishi, a ~12 year old boy.
Rishi was not a highly rated player and I went in thinking “I should probably win this.” But that didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened! I lost. Rishi kind of crushed me. Here’s the game.
Not only that, he subtly shit talked me. After 18: Qxc3, when I was already kind of toast, he said “There was a better move there“. No shit Rishi! There’s always a better move, do you think I’d be losing to you if I knew what the better move was???
Once the writing was on the wall I felt pretty dejected. Other players can walk around the hall and whenever they would walk to our board and see that I was losing I just felt… embarrassed. As if they were saying to themselves “jeez, this new guy fucking sucks“.
And on the drive home, after two weeks of feeling like I might be on to something new that I like, I instead thought “I just got pwned by one of the lowest rated players here, why am I wasting my time?“.
Which brings us to this morning. If I follow my feeling from last night I would say I’m just not that good and stick to chess as an online hobby.
But good is relative! Am I “good” at running, for example? I mean, kind of, apparently my 2:33 marathon puts me in the top 0.25%, but there are still thousands of runners way faster than me. That marathon was a success because I felt it proved what I was ultimately capable of, not because of where I placed.
To me, losing to Rishi does not reflect what I am capable of. I was embarrassed by it the same way I’d be embarrassed by a 3:00 marathon; to some that would be great, but to myself, it’s disappointing.
I enjoyed playing these games and want to prove to myself that I’m better than Rishi. So this is me saying that I’m not giving up! There are more chess tournaments in my future. You can’t give up just because someone is better than you at something. Especially when it’s a 12 year old Indian boy named Rishi.
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