Three consecutive losses in a tournament is dryly termed ‘castling queenside’, in reference to the chess notation for that move (0-0-0). Carissa Yip went one worse, starting with four demoralising zeros at the Cairns Cup in St Louis this month. The 16-year-old American was the lowest ranked player in the elite women’s all-play-all tournament, so it wasn’t about to get any easier, and her experienced opponents were surely looking to capitalise.
In the fifth round, she bounced back in style with a win over seven-time US women’s champion Irina Krush. ‘Someone told me that
I should just fake it till I make it,’ Yip explained after the game. Those were wise words, not just teenage insouciance. Some measure of confidence is simply indispensable for playing good chess. Josh Waitzkin (the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) wrote in his book, The Art of Learning: ‘At one point, after [Garry] Kasparov had lost a big game and was feeling dark and fragile, my father asked [him] how he would handle his lack of confidence in the next game.
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