Othello news
When your tournament is a disaster
26 June 2025Written by Carlo Affatigato
"This cannot happen."
"It's unacceptable."
And yet, it happens. And we’re forced to accept it. We have a fairly clear idea of our potential, of what a decent performance should look like before entering a tournament. Sure, anything can happen in a single game, but over a span of 7 to 10 games across a weekend, we generally know what kind of results we should expect. But then it happens: a weekend goes really, terribly wrong, and you can’t explain what happened. It can’t be just bad luck — bad luck might explain one, maybe two poor games, but not an entire tournament. When an entire weekend goes badly, there’s something more serious going on that needs to be understood.
That happened to me last weekend, for the first time. I came home more disheartened than I’ve ever been since I started playing Othello. And it didn’t help when people told me: “maybe you were just tired.” I’m usually good at managing fatigue. That can’t be it. I feel the need to find a more practical explanation, something I can work on. So, after a few natural days of discouragement, I had to do the only thing you can do in these cases: rationalize.
Yes, it happens...
First, a simple observation: it happens to everyone. Talk to other players, and almost all of them will have a story to tell — a tournament that hit them harder than usual, without a convincing explanation. Tom Schotte, at the end of the 2023 World Championship, was "ready to retire" (his own words): after nine rounds he had six points and was 11th overall, but then he lost four straight games on the second day — all to lower-rated opponents. He finished the championship in 53rd place and was visibly shaken (I was there, I still remember the look on his face). Piamrat Kraikokit still remembers the disappointment from the 2007 World Championship, when everyone expected him to do better than the year before — and instead he scored lower than expected. Ask around: everyone has a story.
Bad luck has nothing to do with it. You can definitely blame a lack of focus, and there are many possible reasons for that: fatigue, yes, or maybe a not-so-great state of health, or mental distractions. There are a lot of factors that can cause your brain’s performance to fluctuate at any given time. And — pay attention to this — these fluctuations are far larger than most people think. Not just in live tournaments, but even online. Look at the chart of my recent online rating, below.
That drop in the middle box coincided with a seasonal flu. I often played with a fever, and this was the result. The brief climbs were the times of day when the fever had gone down thanks to meds, then the fever returned, and the rating dropped even more.
(“Ok, but why are you playing Othello with a fever??”
“Because I don’t really care about my rating!”
“Yeah, and then you write lengthy articles about it when something goes wrong.”
“I want to speak to my lawyer!”)
Some quick math: if my rating dropped by 70 points in two days, with a decline that showed no signs of stopping, it means that when I’m healthy I play at around 2000–2050, and when I’m sick, I probably play at... 1900, maybe lower. The rating drops so fast because it tries to adjust quickly to my actual performance level, right?
Illnesses, disorientation, lack of sleep, fatigue, environmental distractions — all these can make a difference in performance like we were 100+ rating points lower. And there can be other reasons: in the case of my tournament last weekend, I have an even stranger theory, but I’ll save it for the end.
... but how often?
Let’s add another piece to the puzzle: statistics.
Even when we’re in a perfectly normal mental state, the chance of losing to a player who’s 50–100 rating points lower than us is around 40%. With a 150-point gap, it’s about 30%. This is based on the Elo formula — check it out here if you want to dig deeper.
In a typical tournament, across a weekend, let's say you’ll play at least 7 games against players in that range. You play seven games where you have an average 30% chance of losing. What are the odds that you win all of them? Or lose one or two?
With a 30% average chance of losing, the probability of winning seven games out of seven is 8.23%
(70% ^7 — shocking, right?)
The probability of winning at least six is less than 33%. That means there’s a 67% chance you’ll lose at least two games, and a 35% chance you’ll lose three or more. For the stat lovers out there, this is the binomial distribution — have fun with the math.
In other words, even if you’re playing at your normal strength, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll lose at least once to a lower-rated opponent. Probably even twice. There’s nothing to explain when it happens. It’s pure statistics.
And how much does it weigh on our perception?
Now let’s bring in the psychological side. According to the loss aversion concept introduced by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979, a loss feels twice as painful as an equally sized win feels good. To compensate for the psychological sting of a loss, our mind needs at least two wins of equal magnitude. Read their Prospect Theory — it’s one of those things that can genuinely change your life.
Our brain is simply hypersensitive to what we perceive as failures. They bring us down much more than equivalent successes lift us up.
Now let’s combine all of this with what typically happens in a tournament. As we saw earlier, if we play seven games against players we think we “should beat,” and we have a 67% chance of losing at least two, we’re already at risk of feeling very disappointed. If we lose three out of seven, it’s over — the wins won’t be enough to cancel out the emotional hit of the losses. If we lose two and then we add the psychological burden of the losses against higher-rated players (which almost certainly happen), it becomes harder and harder to leave the tournament feeling satisfied. Being disappointed after a tournament is basically a certainty.
Conclusion
A very long article, filled with math and psychology (sorry, that’s what happens when you try to rationalize), all to make a simple point:
Feeling like a tournament was a disaster is more common than we think. You’ve probably experienced it yourself. And you’ve also probably been on the other side, witnessing other players’ frustration — or even anger — when you outperformed them. You've seen Magnus Carlsen's viral reaction after his loss some weeks ago, haven't you?
So what should we do? The first and obvious answer: don’t let it crush you. Wait some days, get back on the board, focus harder, and the satisfying results will come. Alongside that, the mental trick to avoid letting the disappointment drag us down too far is to fight the weight our mind assigns to a few losses. And typically, we’re quite good at that. At "making excuses." "I ate too much." "I didn’t sleep well." "The lighting wasn’t right." (yes, I really heard that one). We even joked about it when we talked about the funniest moments of W.O.C. 2023. If there’s one thing we need to master, it’s finding acceptable explanations for our losses — just enough to keep us from being too discouraged.
As for me, I’ve found my explanation for last weekend’s tournament: I didn’t eat enough sweets. And at the next tournament, I’m bringing a spoon and a jar of jam. Yes, I know it's weird. No, I don’t want to talk about it.