>"There was nothing quite as nerve wracking as sitting opposite your opponent in an important match and shaking hands and the first moves."
This has been true with most sports or competition based activities that I have done too. There's nothing quite like the nerves you get just before a match starts
Yes it's true. Though with Chess it felt different. I guess with sports you are pitting physical or athletic ability against an opponent but with Chess it's your mind and intellect which seems to draw the ego out more. Winning is euphoric but losing is a crushing psychological blow to the essence of what makes you... your mind.
Were you ever as competitive (that is, skilled and practiced) in any particular physical sport as you were in chess? I suspect that if you'd put as much of yourself into, say, tennis or soccer, that you'd have felt similarly.
EDIT:
I've been pondering this a bit more, and I want to share my thoughts.
I was thinking about how some of my friends react to losses in mental sports/games versus physical sports/games and their particular histories, as well as my own.
Playing a bit to the idea of dualism of mind and body, some people focus more of their energy on the mind and some on the body. This affects their notion of self. For you, your focus was on chess and the mind, consequently a loss in that game or evidence of your mind not being as honed as your opponents strikes your ego more than a loss on the tennis court might. I have teammates on a rec soccer league who take it very seriously. They spent their youths practicing soccer or another sport at least as much as you spent on chess. A loss on the field, or a near loss, hits them hard because their sense of self is so tied to their physical capabilities. Anything demonstrating that they aren't as good as an opponent hits them harder than it would me. I'm a tad bit more like you (though never seriously competitive in mental games/sports), my particular focus in those years was on acquisition of knowledge and understanding. This is not a directly competitive thing (outside of trivia games like Jeopardy!), but meeting someone who understands a field, that I've studied, far better than I do is both inspiring and a blow to the ego. "I've spent X hours, days, months studying this, and still I'm nowhere near this person's level of understanding and capability."
All this is not meant to say that your view is wrong, but that what each person experiences as a hit to their ego is going to be different, and largely determined by what they put their energy into. Outrun a former sprinter and they'll feel the effects of their age and it'll weigh on their mind. Beat an old and unpracticed chess champion and it'll be the same. But beat the sprinter at chess and they won't care, and the chess champion might even laugh at the suggestion of a footrace assuming they'd lost before it began.
No I'm speculating. I'm imaging if I lost something involving physical activites I would rationalise it as my opponent being stronger/fitter/faster/better hand eye coordination etc. But how do you rationalise it when someone out thinks you? Deceives you? Displays more cunning and can think ahead better.
I might be making a false distinction but it just seems to be more personal and gets to the core of your being.
> I might be making a false distinction but it just seems to be more personal and gets to the core of your being.
I sort of responded to this in my edit to my previous post. I think that each person's notion of self is different and largely a consequence of where they've spent energy developing themselves. If you focus on chess for years, a loss at chess will hit you harder than a loss at golf. If you focus on golf for years, a loss or a particularly uncharacteristically bad showing will hit you harder than a loss at chess.
I'm competent in mental games and passable at sports. I can outsprint a lot of people younger than me and more practiced primarily because of a fortunate body type, not because of practice. But if someone came in and tore my code apart (I've literally been programming for 75% of my life, starting at age 8), that'd hurt me more than any game or sport. Still mental, like chess for you, but it's probably more significant that it's been my focus for so much of my life.
Just to expand the topic a top surgen with hand issues with have a 'similiar' loss of self experience. In the end people often define themselves by the roles they play "I am a Programmer" even out of context "I am a retired Teacher."
This has been true with most sports or competition based activities that I have done too. There's nothing quite like the nerves you get just before a match starts