A Sense of Urgency

Sometimes when you spot a move that seems to get you out of trouble (or initiate a strong attack), you may feel an urge to play that move immediately. That false sense of urgency is probably the most common cause of mistakes in chess, so let's have a closer look.

The sense of urgency is entirely based on fear. Apart from the usual fear of losing the game or making a fool of yourself, there are deeper fears at play here.

In general, when you have a bad position, you don't want to know just how bad it is. You don't want to accept defeat until in stares you in the eye, and therefore you immediately play the first move you see that holds some kind of promise. That's why bad positions often crumbles to pieces much quicker than they need to. Some players are very good at rescuing bad positions - when you think they're completely lost, they launch a counter attack, or when they have two pieces hanging, they hang a third only to complicate things. What they are doing here is exploiting a particular fear in their opponents. When you think you're winning, your worst fear is to screw it up, even a draw would be a terrible defeat.

The normal reaction to a frightening or stressful situation is the fight or flight response. That's an automatic psychological reaction that temporarily disables the logical thinking. It may serve you well when you meet a lion on the savanna, but a chess board is a different environment with zero risk of physical injury. So, what you have to do is to take a deep breath, sit on your hands, and wait for the fight or flight response to fade away. That's not what my opponent did in the position below.

Black is clearly winning here, mate will soon follow after Qa8. I knew that I had a lost position, so defence was not an option. I decided to play gx5, a very unexpected (and also very bad) move, and let my opponent work out the consequences. Black was stunned by the threat to their Rook, and immediately played 1...Rh6 to get out of the line of fire, but 2. Rg1+ won the Queen and the game.

Takeaway

Never give in to the fight or flight response. The worst thing that can happen is that you lose the game. If you have a bad position, see it as a training session. There's always a chance to save the game, and if you don't, you have at least learned something!