Russell Sherwood Thursday, August 5, 2021
Keep your Cool!
Emotion plays a surprising large part in chess and also in Correspondence Chess, despite the remoteness of play!
This week’s tip is fairly simple – always be in the right state of mind when you analyse and make your moves.
Whilst the vast majority of correspondence players are perfectly reasonable and decent in their approach to the game, there are a majority who are not, evidenced by behaviours such as:
- Dead Man’s Defence
- Making Draw offers in lost positions
- Dragging games on f o r e v e r…..
- Making comments about how a game is a draw (when it's not)
- The list goes on
It is also worth remembering that there are other behaviours which can annoy you, but you don’t know your opponents' motivation. For example, you have a player who players quickly for a month, then slowly for a month, then quickly for a month – I had this and it turned out my opponent worked away from home and had very limited access to IT during that time!
The key here is to always be “in your zone” before you start to work on a position and put aside any negative feelings you may have!
CorredpondenceChessPsychologyTipoftheWeek
