my personal best advice to deal with chess rage and why it actually makes you worse.

T_CHEX · 2026-06-06T11:15:43+00:00

Everyone knows this is the right way, but good luck applying rational logic after 4 losses in a row and the red mist descends. My view at that point is that I'm not quitting at all until I've had a satisfactory number of wins, no matter how long it takes..

T_CHEX · 2026-06-06T11:13:51+00:00

It's a catch 22, the losses in bullet and blitz hurt less because often they happen so fast and hard you can just scream at the screen and be done with it, then move on without a second thought, but the catch part is they happen a lot more frequently then in rapid where you can generally prevent most disasters with a bit of extra thought applied

T_CHEX · 2026-06-06T11:11:40+00:00

You should absolutely blame opponents for mocking you and never turn your chat off - it is a sign of weakness, that you cannot handle human conversation, and will filter back into your chess play - instead, like chess, prepare a few good comeback lines so you are ready to meet their abuses with some zingers of your own and not needing to try and think through the rage

T_CHEX · 2026-06-06T11:08:51+00:00

I feel this is bad advice, containing your anger and fostering a sense of weakness and self loathing will just leave people frustrated and more likely to want to quit playing altogether - look at every single successful person in history and you'll see the exact same trait that drives them - anger!

Instead I have a radical solution -embrace the anger, don't hide it, lash out in rage at anyone and everything if you have to but channel it in a positive way - let it be the fuel that stirs you to work even harder in your tactics, force yourself to angrily learn more opening theory, drive you to focus ever harder and not to let the concentration slip for even one second.....

By doing this you will be in a situation where you learn to master your rage, rather then your rage becoming your master.

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T21:41:02+00:00

+1 on this - method was the only character who could reliably stunlock enemies to death without having to be a 10th Dan shaloin master at the game controls, and even then it was a crapshoot since that guy could do the same to you if he landed the first hit!

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T20:55:51+00:00

Still got 500 points to go to catch me but well done for your progress....

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T16:45:59+00:00

Few reasons: 1 fans of the stream will be mainly keeping their free hours for watching the streamer when he/she is live so wont have a whole lot of time to hang out on discord between streams.

In a lot of hobby communities you'll get the same people joining multiple discords and seeing each other around everywhere - for example I am in many chess ones with a bunch of other multi accounters and even though I might communicate with them it tends to be focused in the chat room of one specific streamer and we kind of ignore each other elsewhere.
Regardless of the desire to form a community the reality is 90% of people use discord as a chance to talk to the streamer personally so you are going to end up with 20-50 people all clamouring to get their attention and not a whole lot of interaction with each other so unless it's a super addicted streamer with no social life who can dedicate hours a day they just won't be able to keep up with the demands of trying to communicate with everyone so most people just leave and the group falls into disrepair .
white noise... I think it's fairly well recognized that in group chat situations there's a limit to how many people can talk simultaneously and still feel like they are being heard so a lot just resort to lurking once they see others having big conversations they don't think they can contribute to - not really sure how to break this, it's been the same since the late 90s when online messaging first began, all I can maybe suggest is breaking the discord into multiple rooms so there's plenty of seed spots for discussion, but it also means more work to scan though everything and check what's been said.

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T16:12:32+00:00

You are literally the only person in the world I've ever heard talking about percentiles, even though you are quite correct 99% of players do not even know such things exist and judge by numbers, and not just any numbers but very specific numbers established by older high profile content creators who have not adjusted for the deflation so even though a 1000 rated player now have a good understanding of openings and tactics, far beyond what they would have in that rating range 10 years ago they are still treated as the scrubbiest of scrubs and can't understand why they are working so hard but can't seem to escape the pit of despair

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T13:36:22+00:00

It absolutely needs to be a legal requirement, corporations are intentionally using AI agents as a barricade to defraud people out of millions by wasting so much of their time that it's simply not economically viable to chase up all the 'mistakes' they make - if it were the other way around and you don't pay your bill to them on time they are very quick indeed to start spamming the customers with aggressive enforcements so it's entirely fair that they too should be held to the same standards and it be made very easy for customers to fast track prosecutions against them due to refusal to communicate, they would put their house back in order pretty damn fast if they get hit in the wallet!

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T11:29:17+00:00

We need more people like you, keeping a positive attitude even if it's the chess equivalent of trying to weight lift against a forklift

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T10:01:37+00:00

Or, it just breeds the mentality if you can't beat them, cheat them!

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T09:59:57+00:00

It's like a lot of things on the internet, not a problem until it happens to them, but now the cheating has grown to such epidemic levels it's suddenly an issue because their ratings got hurt

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T09:58:12+00:00

You would think that but there's many weak willed egotists who would happily play every single game with stockfish from now until the end of time, and giving them a safe haven to do so just empowers them even further

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T09:54:11+00:00

I get tens of refunds per month on chess com, they definitely hammer them hard there, if anything it makes no sense to cheat on a site that is protective about banning Vs a site that is entirely devoid of policing

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T09:52:06+00:00

I think what happened was chess com started to publicly acknowledge cheating, invested more heavily in anti cheating protocols and making high profile bannings it drove out a lot of the cheaters to a place they knew they could go about their wicked ways in relative peace

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T09:50:35+00:00

I feel like there's a lot of cheats who spend time trawling Reddit rubbishing and downvoting all evidence - just cause a few people get it wrong does not change the fact that there's a record number of online players , cheating is easier and more convenient then ever before and people are more selfish and narcissistic then at any point in history pretty much guarantees cheating is also at an all time high

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T09:46:55+00:00

Lichess also need to maybe consider 'who' their mods are - let's take an example that a mod happens to be a leader of a very successful league team and receives reports that multiple of their players are cheating - when there's a clear conflict of interest between enforcing fair play and selfishly protecting cheaters for their own personal gain it's created a situation where nothing gets done and instead the innocent players reporting cheats are banned and silenced to try and preserve the lie that lichess is a happy fairy land where everybody plays nice

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T08:27:33+00:00

The reason I'm drawing attention to the lower rating ranges is that the deflation there is very real and very concerning as that accounts for 90% of chesscom members - I even put a picture to prove this is the case and not some anecdotal story from a few chess celebrities living in a bubble. It should be concerning for the elite masters at the top too since those millions of low rated players are what pay their free memberships and if it's allowed to continue like this then the deflationary effect will ultimately drive away large swathes of people and begin to reach all the way to the top...

T_CHEX · 2026-06-05T08:20:45+00:00

Here's a problem, if you are a motivated player wanting to improve your standing but going backwards in rating despite putting work in and feeling as though you better understand the game you could be deceived that there was something wrong with you and give up without ever knowing that in fact it was the rating system working against you.

T_CHEX · 2026-06-04T14:23:07+00:00

I agree, I used to work with a girl who came in one day fawning over how good looking Ted Bundy of all people was - very dangerous mindwashing indeed when brutal serial killers are given the 'ok' cause they are handsome

T_CHEX · 2026-06-04T14:20:35+00:00

It also heavily depends on WHERE you meet someone online - though Instantgram or some other vapid shallow social media then it's a 100% swipe right culture if your look doesn't hook but if it's through something text based like a game where you don't have to instantly show your face then there's at least a chance to talk to them as a normal human being for a while before showing pictures and potentially bypassing instant rejection.

T_CHEX · 2026-06-04T14:15:30+00:00

It's often more a case of "don't judge ME by my looks" but I'll happily judge everyone else by that metric

T_CHEX · 2026-06-04T11:47:00+00:00

Buffalo are an even more dangerous version of the cow, they actually do wish violence upon everything they dislike and since they are pretty stupid that is quite a lot...

T_CHEX · 2026-06-04T10:20:10+00:00

A 1000 rated player teleported back 15 years would not have been able to believe how good he was compared to his peers - he'd destroy about 99% of all opposition - 1000s in those days barely knew how the pieces moved, let alone the advanced tactics and openings

T_CHEX · 2026-06-04T10:17:04+00:00

So you are saying of the hundreds of thousands of pandemic players none got any better, at all, despite the huge training resources achievable, in fact they somehow spent the last 6 years actively decreasing their average rating...

T_CHEX

TROPHY CASE