It resonates with some experience I had in playing the game of go at a competitive level.
Go is a perfect information game but it’s very hard to know exactly what will be the outcome of a “fight” (you would need to look up to 30 moves ahead in some cases).
So when the other guy would kill your group of stones after a “life or death” scenario, because he had a slight advantage in the fight, it feels like the other is lucky, and most people have really bad thoughts and just give up.
Once, I created an account with the bio “I don’t resign” to see what would happen if I forced myself to not concede and keep playing after a big loss. It went surprisingly well and I even went to play the highest ranked guy connected on the server. At this point, I completely lost the game and there was 100+ people watching the game, so I just resigned.
Looking back, it definitely helped me to continue fighting even after a big loss, and stop the mental chatter. However, there’s a trade-off between the time gained by correctly estimating the probability of winning and resigning when too improbable, and the mental energy gained from not resigning (minus the fact that your opponent may be pretty pissed off).
Thanks for the post!
It resonates with some experience I had in playing the game of go at a competitive level.
Go is a perfect information game but it’s very hard to know exactly what will be the outcome of a “fight” (you would need to look up to 30 moves ahead in some cases).
So when the other guy would kill your group of stones after a “life or death” scenario, because he had a slight advantage in the fight, it feels like the other is lucky, and most people have really bad thoughts and just give up.
Once, I created an account with the bio “I don’t resign” to see what would happen if I forced myself to not concede and keep playing after a big loss. It went surprisingly well and I even went to play the highest ranked guy connected on the server. At this point, I completely lost the game and there was 100+ people watching the game, so I just resigned.
Looking back, it definitely helped me to continue fighting even after a big loss, and stop the mental chatter. However, there’s a trade-off between the time gained by correctly estimating the probability of winning and resigning when too improbable, and the mental energy gained from not resigning (minus the fact that your opponent may be pretty pissed off).