Another Horror
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In the previous post we looked at one sort of mental malfunction, and as I went through the comments (much appreciated, and empathized with!) I recalled a horror story of my own from earlier this year. In the second round of a club tournament the position in a queenless middlegame was pretty complicated, and my decision was also a two-mover of sorts. To decide on my 24th move I had to weigh a pair of options on move 25, and after spending eight of my last 22 minutes picking a 25th move option I was happy with made my 24th move and rushed off to the restroom for a final time before zeitnot.
When I came back to the board, my opponent had made the move I expected, and I immediately replied...only to realize with Kasparovian horror (but a slightly better poker face) that the move I played was the one I had rejected. Oof. Fortunately it wasn't much worse than the intended move, and the game turned out alright. Still, the feeling of horror was mind-blowing when I realized what I had done. It's not just the quality of the move and the sporting repercussions that come into play, but a feeling of helplessness - one thinks one thing and does another. As far as I can recall that's the only time that this sort of error has happened to me, whether as victim or recipient, but I have seen other examples of this sort in the literature.
Has that, or anything similar, happened to you?
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Reader Comments (4)
I had a similar experience this past weekend! I was winning against a master and I was up a pawn in a rook endgame with the more active rook and the initiative. I had two choices, I could check his king first or queen a pawn. I checked the king and he put his king in a stalemate position, and instead of letting his king out, I went ahead and queened the pawn, and then I saw that he would try to get a perpetual check with his rook. By this point, we had a few spectators.
I then realized that I could escape the checks. He would check my king all the way around the board but I then calculated that I would run my king from f3 to h3 then up the board to h7 and over to e7, then e6 when he would run out of checks or I could win his rook with my new queen. I was pleased that I could calculate all of that and see the result. He did exactly that and when my king reached e6, he resigned. Immediately after that, an FM pointed out that he could have gotten a perpetual in another way and I couldn't have gotten out of it. He was none too pleased and neither was I. I had played an excellent game and thrown away the win by one mistake.
The win gave me the U2000 prize and the upset prize for the round. Rybka confirmed it all with the ?? with the comment "throws away the win" and his next move got the same for throwing away the draw. I guess the invisible hand of Caissa intervened and gave me the win.
I had a game where I had Knights on f6 and g6, and my opponent had just played g5, attacking one of them. I picked up the Knight to move it away. With the Knight cltuched in midair, to my horror, I looked at the board and noticed I had picked up the wrong Knight. I put it back on it's original square to contemplate any move with it that could save the fate of it's partner, but to no avail.
My opponent gave me a slightly sympathetic look. We both know it was touch move.
Amazingly, a piece down, I still managed to draw!
When I was a junior, maybe 13 or 14 years old, and had just started playing for my county A team in the UK, I was black in a KID with the usual fianchetto setup. My opponent had a bishop on h6, and I had just taken a pawn on f5 with a knight. This put the knight en prise, but Bxg7 was forced and I was going to recapture with the knight on f5, thus winning a pawn.
Now when, as I did, you play the Dragon against e4 and KID against d4, you end up playing the sequence 1. B(h6)xg7 Kxg7 about a million times. So of course, when my opponent played Bxg7, I immediately took with the king, thus losing a piece.
But that wasn't the worst of it. I resigned immediately. However, I'd had a close to overwhelming position before this fiasco, and after looking at the board for a couple of seconds post-resignation, I realized that although I was going to be down a knight for two pawns, I had lots of dynamic advantages in the sort of position I liked, and would still have been playing for a win. So I slapped myself on the forehead, stood up, and told the team captain that I thought I'd resigned a won position. But I somehow managed to give him the impression that I wasn't sure whether I'd resigned or not. This was over 3 decades ago, but I still remember the unnerving feeling throughout the whole episode that I was just an observer of all this stupid behavior, and it wasn't really me doing it.
the psychological reason this happens is as follows:
*you obsess/stress about a particular move (which you consider a critical one)for a long time
*sadly you have to let that line go
*you find another, but spend less time thinking about it
*now the brain is relieved... and shuts down for a rest and puts you on auto pilot
*the brain gets confused *what* it is relieved about! and because you stressed the most about the "critical move" it thinks thats what its relieved about and plays it on auto pilot
remnences of our caveman brain ... its what makes chess fun
[DM: I know just what you mean, but I don't think that was the story this time around.]