Gambling with Chess Rating
I play chess too much. That's a fact.
By metrics, I'm pretty good. As a 2500 bullet and 2200 blitz player, I definitely am not terrible and would beat most people.
With that being said however, I keep finding myself on lichess.org time and time again wasting my time playing bullet chess. It's not fun, it's super stressful (am I going to lose rating?), it's sometimes rage inducing, and it really doesn't add any benefit (besides boasting about how good I am). And yet I continue to play.
I am not sure why this is. Yet the title of this post is my hypothesis -- that when I boot up another bullet game, it's like gambling but better; even though I probably only have like a 52% win rate overall, the challenge of first beating a strong player but also of retaining my rating points (not losing) really forces me to act like a gambler when I'm playing --- I try to reclaim my losses, I get mad when I lose many games in a row, and I endlessly pour time into playing, for well, nothing.
At least I'm not losing money gambling; I'm only losing my time, perhaps my health, and my sanity. And at least I'm not playing an algorithm -- I'm playing against another human.
I've gotta stop playing chess, especially chess that has no meaning behind it.