chessfeels: conversations about chess, psychology & mental health

What do chess teaching and practicing therapy have in common? It sounds like a joke, and probably is, but you'll have to listen if you want to find out the actual answer.

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Julia and JJ are joined by WGM and multi-hyphenate US chess champion, poker pro, and author Jennifer Shahade to talk about the future (and past) of social media, the mental side of chess, and the open Sicilian.

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You're studying openings bad and you should feel bad! In the first podcast to ever feature two of the four highest rated chess players in the state of Nebraska, Omaha-based FM Nate Solon joins Julia and JJ to talk about how he studies openings and why that makes him better than other people. He also talks about his new book, "Evaluate like a GM," co-authored with GM Eugene Perelshteyn, and why 'evaluation' is an undervalued art in chess study.

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Maybe like bookshop.org
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Julia and JJ solicited scary and "scary" stories from listeners and compiled them for a very spooky episode.

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Julia and JJ continue their conversation about how anxiety can impact your chess. They talk about how to notice when your thoughts turn from 'observational' to more 'reactive' or 'evaluative,' and how annotating your own (slow) chess games can be a great way to practice these observational skills.

JJ mentions the chess dojo training program which is really good
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The Miami Temple Israel would like to remind listeners that they did not condone the message of Drake's music in his 're-bar-mitzvah' music video. 

Julia explains what anxiety really is, and JJ talks about how they see this manifest in several of their students' annotations of their own slow games. You can learn how to, like, do anything about it next week.

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Julia and JJ are joined by Chris Callahan, the community organizer for LiChess.org. They discuss what LiChess does, and could do, about the addictiveness of blitz, how to be more accessible, and, about all sorts of cool stuff LiChess already does.

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Chris mentions the outrageous variants on pychess and visualization training on listudy
See this page for the full list of extensions 

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Julia and JJ talk about The Cheating Scandal, against their better judgment, breaking down the philosophical questions and psychological implications of The Scandal and make lots of jokes about anal beads in the process. Why does it matter that Magnus did not explicitly accuse Hans of cheating? What counts as evidence of cheating? Would the scandal be a scandal if You People didn't tweet so much?

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What should we do when our love of chess and our exhaustion with competition come into conflict? Julia and JJ tackle the question of why competitive and amateur chess players alike make such a big deal out of quitting. What does it mean to 'quit chess' if it's still a part of your life? What could 'recreational chess play' look like? Where does the desire to quit, rather than merely take a break, from playing competitive chess come from? Why do people think the options are 'keep improving' or 'quit playing'? Why are we like this? 

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After a week where chess twitter imploded under the weight of its users debating the value of giving unsolicited advice to other chess players, Julia and JJ decided to unsolicitedly tell everyone why they're using twitter wrong. They're joined by the legend Omar for a heartfelt discussion about how hard it is to hear the hard truth sometimes (stop playing bl*tz).

While we take a break to get ready for season 2 of chessfeels (#2chess2feels), you can
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