Does losing hurt?

[daal]

Recently, I posted that the only reason I play go is that I think it's cool. I guess though that I also think: the stronger the cooler.

Quite frankly, I don't find go much fun. Half of the time I lose, and it hurts. I guess that that's because I'd like to see my rank going up, and considering all the studying I do, it seems like it ought to, but basically, for the last year I continue to win as much as I lose. While winning is sometimes a nice feeling (if my opponent put up a good fight), losing almost always just hurts. I just feel bad about it. Typically, I know immediately what caused the loss, and that just makes me angrier that I didn't prevent it. I feel like the main reason to not feel bad about losing is that you can learn from your losses, but I don't feel that I am. I especially feel this way after sending my rank plummeting when it was so close to the next one.

I enjoy doing tsumego, I enjoy reading go books but part of the enjoyment is the promise that it will make me stronger. But it isn't. I'm not improving, I'm not having fun and I'm starting to wonder if the reason I play is to get cooler, or because I'm a sucker for punishment. I keep thinking about the pro poker player who said: "You know that feeling when you lose so much money that you can't breathe, I like that." I don't think I like it, and while losing a go game doesn't feel that bad, I wonder why I keep putting myself through it.

Somewhere, I sense a paradox lurking. I want to improve so that my games won't so often end in pain, but that's obviously folly. Nonetheless, I don't want to stop trying, because that would feel like acknowledging failure. I wish there was a smiley of someone throwing up.

[SpongeBob]

It really hurts - but I don't hate that.

[Kirby]

First of all, I can relate to your feeling. It is frustrating to me that I am not improving faster.

In your case, I get the impression that there is some hope for improvement, particularly when you mention this:

...I feel like the main reason to not feel bad about losing is that you can learn from your losses, but I don't feel that I am. I especially feel this way after sending my rank plummeting when it was so close to the next one.
...

It's often said that someone often loses a bit before advancing to the next level. From this perspective, it sounds like you are close to gaining a stone. After all, you mentioned that you were close to the next rank before it dropped a bit - and if you're playing on KGS, the rank is on a continuous scale, with discrete ranks drawn in.

Anyway, there are many ways to spend your time in life. It's probably worth it to periodically re-examine the way you want to use this time. In regard to go, while I often worry that I will not improve, I still maintain the belief that it is always possible to stretch yourself a little further.

So, if getting better at go is important to you, I believe that there is a way to advance from your current level. It could cost a lot of time to get that advancement - and you don't know what the price is for that advancement until you've already paid your time.

I guess the question is, do you want to pay that currently-unknown amount of time to get better at this game? The only person that knows the answer to that is you.

[mmmd]

For me it seems to be a bit different, winning or loosing a game, especcially online has more or less lost its meaning for me after the first 1000 games. For me joy or "pain" only comes from how I play, a game which I lose, but in which I played better than normally is enjoyable for me, while a game in which i win even though i played horribly is pain.
But i can relate very well to the pain of not improving, but sometimes it feels like I am improving even if my rank doesn't show it especcially if I unlearn halftruths or thinking habits.

[Mivo]

Why is constant improvement important to you? It sounds a bit like you have attached too much personal (ego) value to Go, and look at it as a mirror of your personality, your self-worth, and a tool to measure your self-esteem by. So if you lose, it may seem like a blow to who you are, in your own view, and may therefore feed deeply rooted insecurities ("too old", "too dumb", "too hopeless"). If this is true (and I could be completely off), the solution may be found in tackling those insecurities rather than the symptoms of them (in other words: Go just brings out these feelings, it isn't the cause of them).

[levanez]

Losing is part of getting strong. If you want to get stronger, you need to play someone stronger than you, and obviously you'll lose a lot at first. Let's say you're a 6k, if your win/lose ratio against other 6k's is 50%, that means it's your true rank. If it's lower, there's something at this level you still haven't grasped yet. If your ratio is higher than 50%, you've become a strong 6k, and eventually you'll be able to win 100% of the times and really feel your strength. But when you started to win more than lose against equals you'll often want to try stronger opponents - let's say 5k - , then naturally you'll lose a lot before you can correct your mistakes and start winning again. Doing tsumegos and reading books can help, but like textbook theory they only prove useful if you can apply them in real games.

I guess what I mean to say is, losing is just part of the game, you'll always lose at first. What enjoyment I find in go is when I finally break a barrier and advance to the next level.

[entropi]

In my opinion, one of the most valuable things you can learn from Go is how to handle these feelings when you lose.

"I lost but learnt this or that" is no consolation in my opinion. You need to really face the fact that you lost and get strong enough to control your feeling.

What helped me to overcome such feelings was treating each game as a conversation with your opponent or even with yourself. Talk to yourself (mentally of course if you don't want be labelled mad ) during a game, simple things like "I want to invade here, maybe I can't do but let's try", or "what a mistake was that, can I recover at all",...

I know it sounds stupid, but just try it, you will be surprised how much it helps to control your bad feelings.

[daniel_the_smith]

Something that helped me a while ago is actually concentrating on winning games. I know it sounds silly, but if you ask yourself with every move, if you factor into every decision, "Why am I playing here? Will this help me win the game?" you can stay away from a lot of doomed experiments.

Often in hindsight you realize something was a bad idea one or two moves later. Well, read those lines out an extra stone or two, and make that hindsight into foresight. Never think, "Well, this'll probably be ok for me"-- visualize the result and decide if it really is ok or not. I feel pretty confident saying everyone can read out one stone further than they usually do if they make the effort. So make that effort, every move, and when it becomes natural-- make more effort and read out yet another stone.

Monitor your thought process while playing as objectively as possible. If you spend a lot of time thinking about a move and decide it's probably not good for you, then don't play it. This seems obvious but is surprisingly hard to implement. If you always end up playing the moves you spend time thinking about, then all that thinking is not having any effect. When thinking about a move, you are trying to decide whether or not to play it, not trying to figure out what happens after you play it. Now, both questions produce the same mental exercises, so you have to take extra care to keep the first question in mind while you evaluate the second. If you play the move you came up with after half a second of thinking, you literally had half a second to be intelligent.

Note, if you are playing to learn, to train your intuition (the process that comes up with moves in half a second)-- then the above does not apply. But if you aren't actively trying to discredit your move, don't spend a lot of time thinking about it, either.

Pay special attention to positions where your opponent plays something that surprises you, or that you didn't even consider. Always ask yourself, "Is this move so bad that it didn't deserve my attention?" If the answer is no, then your reading process for the last move was a failure, whether or not it ends up working out for you. Don't feel bad when this happens, as it will happen a lot. Just make a mental note of the position and try to consider that move in similar future positions.

Strive to make rational decisions. Play into boring positions where you're sure you have a small lead rather than exciting ones where you think you might have a large lead. Never ever ever think, "I really want to play here, can I? *read read read* OK, I might be able to get away with it..." Instead, think, "Is this a good move? *read read read* This is a foggy position for me, is there a clearer alternative?"

Finally, you can't just turn this on one game and off on the next. If it doesn't seem hard, you're either a lot smarter than me or not doing it right. You need to practice this rational mindset until it becomes habitual. One bad decision is all it takes to lose a game, so when you work on your thought process, you have to find and stop the mental processes that lead to bad decisions. Almost every move that you regret in hindsight is a move you could have avoided if you'd just been a little more precise in your thinking.

This won't make you superman. But if you stop making all the mistakes you know about, you will be at least a stone stronger. This is true at any level, I think.

I have not been following my own advice here lately. I've also been losing most of my games...

[SoDesuNe]

It hurts and I hate it =D
Then again, competition is good for motivation. I remember when starting at my Go-club, I had to take three stones from a now good friend. Now I'm on the edge to give him two stones.
At the moment I try to chase a two to three Dan but even with a winning position in a four-stone-handicap-game, his reading and positional judgment ALWAYS turns the game. He is so superior, it makes me furious! =D But after the cool-down, I think: "You can get there and that's not even close to the end of the road!". How powerful one can be in Go is amazing.
Sometimes when I watch games online from kghin, bloodarena or roln111 (among others) I almost feel how painfully sharp their moves are and then I think: "I want to play like this!"

This is what keeps me going. I simply want to play beautifully powerful! ; )

But yeah, I can understand - and I experienced it myself - that studying without tasting some kind of fruit, wores you out. Best to do is to do nothing for a while, expeically not studying further (Tsumego is okay, but no Go theory). Play free games for instance, maybe slightly faster games, than what you feel comfortable with. It helped me to not overthink every situation. You will not become stronger immediately but it helped me sorting out things in my head to get a clear view again.

[willemien]

Yes it hurts and i don't like it.

(But mostly it is me beating myself)

but sadly enough it is one of the only ways too learn my mistakes.

If i would only make every error once, i should play faultless by now.

Unfortunedly i even keep making the same errors

[hailthorn011]

I win roughly 40% of my games, so I'm quite familiar with losing a lot of games. Sometimes I can take it in stride, pointing out obvious flaws that if they hadn't occurred, I likely could have won the game. But then I have those games where I just feel so frustrated that I was unable to do anything at all, and those are the games that hurt.

I've almost played Go for a year now, but some losses still hurt. I used to take losing a lot worse earlier on in my Go playing career, so I am getting better about it.

But I still checked yes.

[Fedya]

It depends.

I've had games (especially taking Black against somebody stronger) where my opponent plays as slowly as I do, actually using the time to think, and even though I've lost quite a few such games, they've been some of the mores stimulating games I've played.

Then there are the games where everything seems to go wrong from the beginning; losses like that really do irritate me. There are occasions where I win a game I felt I probably should have lost, only because my opponent made an even bigger blunder. Those games aren't very satisfying, either, even though they're victories.

[daal]

Thanks for the replies. I read through your comments a couple of times, and I'm glad to hear such a broad range of viewpoints and some good suggestions.

[JarrodCL]

For me, while I like winning, I get more out of losing. It teaches me several things:

1) That there's clearly more skill to obtain, or I wouldn't have lost
2) I can use the game for review...I try and only take one important lesson from each game...any more and I risk not remembering anything and just having a fuzzy collection of reasons I lost.
3) I'm lazy when I win...I don't try and work out why I won. I just bask in the warmth of winning....not productive. But fun

[Stable]

I'm not upset when I lose per se. Usually I have lost because I made some big mistakes, then I feel annoyed for having made those mistakes and playing badly. When I feel I've played pretty well and I still lose I'm fine. (I still prefer winning!)