The Psychology of Chess

Dr. Karl Menninger, an aggressive Freudian therapist, once declared of his chessplay: "It seems to be necessary for some of us to have a hobby in which aggressiveness and destructiveness are given opportunity for expression, and since I long ago gave up hunting (because it is too destructive), I have found myself returning more and more to the most ancient of all games." Ernest Jones, a biographer of Sigmund Freud, agreed with such sentiment when he wrote in 1930: "Chess is ... a play substitute for the art of war."

Concerning chess, the famous H.G.Wells wrote: "There is a class of men—shadowy, unhappy, unreal-looking men—who gather in coffee houses, and play with a desire that dies not, and a fire that is not quenched. These gather in clubs and play tournaments...but there are others who have the vice who live in country places, in remote situations—curates, schoolmasters, tax collectors—who must need to find some artificial vent for their mental energy."

Benefits of Chess in Education

Research shows the effectiveness of chess in teaching thinking and enhancing the school performance of children.  Here's a collection of studies and papers on chess and education.

From Loneliness To Passion

You don't have to be a chessplayer to appreciate the psychological insights and life lessons in Dr. Frank Brady's recent book on former American world chess champion, Bobby Fischer. A lot of people experienced a life similar to that of Bobby Fischer. He could be one of those who may had been saved by psychological and spiritual healing. Take a look at how his story mirrors the deepest needs of humanity. His life is interesting but it's a tragedy. Lots we can learn from it though.

             

Checkmating Crime in the Neighborhood with Chess

Grandmaster Sends W. River Anti-Crime Rooks
BY Allen Appel | APR 11, 2011 2:49 PM

When a world-ranked chess champion read a story in the Independent that retired city cop Stacy Spell was determined to checkmate crime in his neighborhood, she decided to help.

By last week seven handsome portable chess sets had arrived in the neighborhood, sent by gender-barrier-breaking Grandmaster Susan Polgar, the director of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (SPICE) at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.

Saturday morning at the square where Derby meets Norton, Spell deployed those sets and oversaw an intense match in which the Sound School’s Seth Ortiz (right) was cornering East Rock School’s Moubarak Oury-Aguy’s king with his knights and rooks.

Along with the sets, Polgar had sent instructional videos and copies of her book.

The square has been plagued in recent years by flagrantly public street sales of drugs and the crime that often follows in its wake.

The Dunkin’ Donuts in the square was the scene of a murder in December and two shootings in February of this year.

On this Saturday morning, the charming square was the scene of more games of chess than of drug dealing.

“It’s becoming infectious, like measles,” Spell said.

This was the fourth weekend Spell, president of the West River Neighborhood Services Corporation, had organized a community clean-up followed by public chess games.

At least 16 people participated. They included Moubarak and Seth and several other kids from Squash Haven, for whom the clean-up was part of the 10 hours of required community service.

The Psychology of Women at Chess

Why are men better at chess than women at the Grandmaster level and all other levels? Why are there more male than female GMs?

A paper published in the European Journal of Social Psychology argues this point:

Women are surprisingly underrepresented in the chess world, representing less that 5% of registered tournament players worldwide and only 1% of the world's grand masters. In this paper it is argued that gender stereotypes are mainly responsible for the underperformance of women in chess. Forty-two male-female pairs, matched for ability, played two chess games via Internet. When players were unaware of the sex of opponent (control condition), females played approximately as well as males. When the gender stereotype was activated (experimental condition), women showed a drastic performance drop, but only when they were aware that they were playing against a male opponent. When they (falsely) believed to be playing against a woman, they performed as well as their male opponents. In addition, our findings suggest that women show lower chess-specific self-esteem and a weaker promotion focus, which are predictive of poorer chess performance.

(Source: "Checkmate? The role of gender stereotypes in the ultimate intellectual sport" from European Journal of Social Psychology, Volume 38 Issue 2, Pages 231 - 245)

Missionaries in Uganda Used Chess

Chess champ from Uganda slum fostered by Lynchburg charity By Liz Barry
Published: March 30, 2011

Born into a Uganda slum, 14-year-old Phiona Mutesa is the “ultimate underdog,” according to freelance journalist Tim Crothers, who spoke at Lynchburg College this week.

“Katwe, where she lives, is a place where dreams are discouraged,” Crothers said.

Against all odds, Phiona, who could barely read and write, earned a spot at the 2010 Chess Olympiad in Russia, where she competed against chess champions from around the world.

Crothers, a freelance journalist from North Carolina, chronicled Phiona’s experience for a January issue of ESPN Magazine. He was invited to speak in Lynchburg Tuesday night for LC’s ongoing effort to raise awareness about poverty in Uganda and Haiti. Events this week also included a human chess game Wednesday at the college to raise money for relief efforts in both countries.

In a way, Lynchburg’s ties to Phiona run deep. At age 9, Phiona got hooked on chess through Sports Outreach, a Lynchburg-based mission organization stationed in her slum.

Run by a six-person staff in Lynchburg, Sports Outreach supports a team of 140 missionaries who provide relief to some of the world’s poorest people. The missionaries use sports, mainly soccer, to connect with local communities.

“Sports is such a wonderful, universal language,” said Rodney Suddith, executive director of Sports Outreach. “We like to say, ‘It all starts with a ball.’”

In the Katwe slum, Sports Outreach added a chess project for kids who didn’t take to soccer. Had it not been for the Lynchburg nonprofit, Phiona might never have picked up a chess piece.

When Crothers met Phiona last fall, she lived in a 10-foot-by-10-foot shack with her mother and four siblings.

Full article here.

Chess At MacDonalds

Knights of the McRound Table
Want fries with that McCheck-mate?
Tuesday, Mar 29, 2011 | Updated 9:58 AM PDT
By Cary Berglund and Scott Weber

McDonald's is best known for their burgers and fries and is a popular after school gathering space for teens.

But a McDonald's in Leimert Park has become as well known for something that is not on the menu for guys well beyond their teens. -- chess.

The daily chess tournament takes place under the golden arches where guys from the neighborhood gather to outsmart and outwit each other. They spend their afternoons… capturing knights.

"Chess is very addiction," says one McDonald's player. "Some guys come in saying they're going to play a game or two and it's night before they leave. That happens a lot."

The cheering section-- which is more quiet observation than actual cheering-- is made up of guys in line for the next game.

The tournament started out in a nearby park. Then one rainy winter, they moved into McDonalds, trash talk and all. And they never left.

"He's a nice guy," one player says of his opponent. "He just can't play."

Full article here.

Reaching Impoverished Communities for Christ Through Chess

I'm given a ministry idea by this video of a social project in New Delhi, India on the possibility of using education and chess to reach impoverished communities for Christ.

A Future For Meher from Gorilla Face on Vimeo.

Life is Like Chess ... You Play Your Best and Hope for the Best

Life is like a game of chess. There are times when you're up and there are times when you're down. Chess teaches a player how to handle pressure and be patient. It disciplines one not to panic even when behind. A right, steady focus can help one win the game, even if there are heavy material losses.

Brief Survey of Psychological Studies of Chess

Chess is an ancient game of skill. It is one of the few such popular games that is devoid of luck. As a result, it has been a popular choice of topic for psychological research, as it provides psychologists with insights into how humans think about problems. Chess has also been a very popular choice for artificial intelligence implentations, and the results have been very successful. For the first time last year, a computer program beat the world champion in a game with regulation time controls.
The main question in psychological studies of chess is the following: how are better players able to win more often? Several factors have been investigated but there are no certain physiological advantages that always lead to better chess-playing. The most common finding of studies is that experience plays a great part in determining one's ability, which is certainly a promising thought for mediocre players. In essence, no chess gene has been found.
This paper will provide an overview of psychological research into chess, with an emphasis on theories that have been proven inaccurate by future research, to show the development o research in this field. As with any other branch of psychology, theories are made, and then refined when conflicting experimental evidence becomes available.
The first serious psychological study of the game of chess was conducted by Alfred Binet, in 1894. Binet, who was best known for his early intelligence tests, observed blindfold chess players as a subset of his investigations into memory. To the average person, playing a game of chess without sight of the board represents an extremely difficult, if not impossible challenge for the memory.¹ Binet's experiment consisted of a survey which was taken by players of all skill levels, from novice to master. He came to the conclusion that blindfold chess players need knowledge and experience, imagination, and memory.² The masters who took part in the survey gave introspective accounts that had some similarities and yet several differences concerning their blindfold play. A common thread among their responses was the fact that they did not use tactile imagery to represent the board. In addition, they were generally able to remember all the moves played in a sequence of blindfold games. One master, Goetz, was able to quickly recall all 336 moves that he made over 10 blindfold games played simultaneously.³ Binet concluded that verbal memory was an integral part of blindfold play. Finally the subjects reported the need to be aware of a general plan of action for each game,⁴ although this would seem to be a necessity for both blindfold and regular chess play.
The masters differed on whether they used visual or abstract imagery to represent the board. The majority said that they used only an abstract representation, combined with subvocalizations of previous moves, to mentally examine the board. A small majority including the well-known master Blackburne claimed to visualize an actual chessboard with pieces on it corresponding to the current position, "just as if before the eyes."⁵ Binet thus came to the realization that his original hypothesis of a strong visual memory being essential for blindfold play was wrong. In addition, he did not explore the almost direct correspondence between experience and ability in blindfold chess.⁶ Fine (1967) claims that any master (rating of 2200 or above) should be able to play at least one game of blindfold chess.⁷
Reuben Fine was a prominent chess-player during the thirties, who competed in the famous AVRO tournament of 1938. He also had considerable experience in psychoanalysis, and in 1956 the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis published his work, The Psychology of the Chess Player. The book gives a very Freudian account of the game of chess, and is useful only to demonstrate the advances that have been made in the realm of psychology with respect to chess within the past forty years.
Fine claimed that chess is a substitute for war. The king is held to represent the father, while the queen is the mother. In addition, the rook, bishop, knight and pawn are taken to be phallic symbols.⁸ Fine draws a lot of significance from the fact that promoted pawns may become any other piece except for the king/father. This restriction implies to Fine that chess-playing boys are discouraged from growing up to be like their fathers. Unfortunately Fine's analysis suffers from its entirely armchair nature. There are no experiments or observations, other than a few biographies of well-known grandmasters to support the hypotheses presented in the book. One consistency in Fine's work is that master chess players all have differing personalities and backgrounds.
The first true psychological enquiry into the minds of chessplayers was made by the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot. de Groot was a master, although certainly below the level of the top players in the world. However, he had much more experience and knowledge of the game than did Binet. De Groot's book was titled Thought and choice in chess (translated from Dutch) and was largely based on his study of chess players of differing abilities. He was able to interview such giants of the chess world as Alekhine and Euwe (both World Champions), and "lesser" grandmasters such as Keres, Tartakower, Flohr, and even Fine, the chess-playing psychoanalyst. In addition, de Groot studied several masters, experts, and "class" (or lower-ranked) chess players.
De Groot gave his subjects a position set up on a chess board. Their task was to determine the best move to make, and to attempt to verbalize all of their thoughts. Fortunately, even mediocre chess players have a wide vocabulary of chess-specific terms ("pin", "fork", "back-row mate") that allow them to describe their thoughts very specifically. One problem about such taking protocols is that only the conscious thought can be captured by the player talking about his or her ideas. Often psychologist refer to a process made in solving chess problems as an automatic one, meaning that it is not thought about proactively. This tends to lessen the weight attached to results of protocol experiments, but they are interesting nonetheless. The positions given differed in that some were decisive tactical positions (meaning that a relatively short combination of moves could force the opposition to resign), some were more positional in nature (meaning that a long-term strategy needed to be devised), and still others were random legal positions.

Read full article.

Chess Therapy at Starbucks

I see an innovative chess mission outreach via the coffee shop. Long Beach Chess Club meets every Thursdays at Starbucks!

They certainly have no illusions of approaching the likes of Bobby Fischer, nor will you catch them playing marathon games into the wee hours of the morning.

“We’re not geniuses, we’re just regular players,” said Dr. Lowell Taubman, a founder and co-president of the Long Beach Chess Club. “We all have a little ADD, so we can’t play for three hours.”

Taubman and other club members set up their rooks, pawns and other chess pieces and boards at Starbucks every Thursday evening at 7:30. Last Thursday Taubman, an internist with a practice on Riverside Boulevard, and Ron Fried, one of his patients, arrived at the coffee shop on West Park Avenue a minute before their scheduled meeting time, so eager are they to order their barista-made drinks and get started.

The Psychology of a Chess Champion

Bobby Fischer, when he was 12 years old, playing in a match at the Manhattan Chess Club on Sept. 14, 1957. (Sam Falk/The New York Times)

Brilliant player, bad moves

Recounting Bobby Fischer’s tragic path from prodigy to pariah
By Matthew Price
February 6, 2011

Chess is not the likeliest path to worldwide celebrity, but Bobby Fischer was no ordinary player. The freakishly talented, freakishly flawed Fischer, who defeated the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Chess Championship, one of the great spectacles of the Cold War, played the game as if it was a blood sport. Dick Cavett once asked him in a TV interview “where is the greatest pleasure” in a match, and Fischer responded, with glee, “When you break his ego — this is where it’s at.”

Spassky said of him that “[i]t’s not if you win or lose against Bobby Fischer; it’s if you survive.” Combative and charming by turns, Fischer, for a time, put the cloistered, cerebral world of chess in the spotlight — he even made the cover of Sports Illustrated. But Fischer’s fame curdled into infamy, and in his last years — he died at 64 in 2008 — he was known more for his anti-Semitic ravings and battles with the US government than for his moves on the chessboard.

Read: A PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOPSY OF BOBBY FISCHER

Frank Brady's New Book on Bobby Fischer

January 30, 2011

One night in 1960, author and chess fan Frank Brady sat down for dinner in a Greenwich Village tavern.

Across the table from him was Bobby Fischer, just a teenager but already a grand master of the game. Fischer was never without his pocket chessboard, and as they lingered over dinner, he pulled it out and began to rehearse for an upcoming match. His eyes glazed, his fingers flew over the little board, and he seemed completely unaware of his surroundings as he whispered to himself about possible moves.

Brady found that in the presence of Fischer's chess genius, his eyes were full of tears.

He describes the scene in his new book, Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall — From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness.

Fischer was a troubled genius. He dropped out of sight after winning the 1972 World Championship against Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union. Today, he's better known as a paranoid recluse whose frequent anti-Semitic and anti-American rants drove away friends and angered the U.S. government.

Read full article here: 
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/30/133272280/the-troubled-genius-of-bobby-fischer

Chess in An African Church Produces a 14-Year-Old Champion

Chess in the church? Yes, the name of the church is Agape Church in Africa. And the name of its 14-year-old chess champion and prodigy is Phiona Mutesi, a competitor in the recent 2010 Chess Olympiad in Russia. How in the world did chess enter this unlikely place in Africa? By a chess "missionary!" It's through coach Robert Katende that Phiona got honed in her chess even beside the church pulpit.  Amazing chess missions story! 

*  This story appears in the January 10, 2011, issue of ESPN The Magazine.
SHE FLIES TO Siberia in late September with nine teammates, all in their 20s, much older than she is. When she won the match that put her on this plane she had no idea what it meant. Nobody had told her what was at stake, so she just played, like always. She had no idea that she'd qualified for the Olympiad; no idea what the Olympiad was. She had no idea that her win would send her to the city of Khanty-Mansiysk, in remote Russia; no idea where Russia was. When she learned all this, she asked just one question: "Is it cold there?"
But here she is, journeying with her countrymen 27 hours across the globe. And though she has known many of them for a few years, they have no idea where she is from or where she aspires to go, because Phiona Mutesi is from a place where girls like her don't talk about that.

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AGAPE CHURCH COULD collapse at any moment. It is a ramshackle structure that lists alarmingly to one side, held together by scrap wood, rope, a few nails and faith. It is rickety, like everything else around it. At the church on this Saturday morning in September are 37 children whose lives are equally fragile. They wander in to play a game none had heard of before they met Coach Robert, a game so foreign that there's no word for it in Luganda, their native language.
Chess.
When they walk through the door, grins crease their faces. This is home as much as any place, a refuge, the only community they know. These are their friends, their brothers and sisters of chess, and there is relative safety and comfort here. Inside Agape church it is almost possible to forget the chaos outside, in Katwe, the largest of eight slums in Kampala, Uganda, and one of the worst places on earth.
There are only seven chessboards at the church, and chess pieces are so scarce that sometimes an orphan pawn must stand in for a king. A child sits on each end of a wobbly pew, both straddling the board between their knobby knees, with captured pieces guarded in their laps. A 5-year-old kid in a threadbare Denver Broncos No. 7 jersey competes against an 11-year-old in a frayed T-shirt that reads "J'Adore Paris." Most of the kids are barefoot. Some wear flip-flops. One has on black wing tips with no laces.
It is rapid-fire street chess. When more than a few seconds elapse without a move, there is a palpable restlessness. It is remarkably quiet except for the thud of one piece slaying another and the occasional dispute over the location of a piece on a chessboard so faded that the dark spaces are barely distinguishable from the light ones. Surrender is signaled by a clattering of captured pieces on the board. A new match begins immediately without the slightest celebration.
Coach Robert Katende is here. So are Benjamin and Ivan and Brian. And up near the pulpit sits Phiona. One of two girls in the room, Phiona is juggling three matches at once and dominating them with her aggressive style, checkmating her young opponents while drawing a flower in the dirt on the floor with her toe. Phiona is 14, and her stone face gives no sign that the next day she will travel to Siberia to compete against the very best chess players in the world.

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ICE? THE OPENING CEREMONIES at the 2010 Chess Olympiad take place in an ice arena. Phiona has never seen ice. There are also lasers and dancers inside bubbles and people costumed as chess pieces marching around on a giant chessboard. Phiona watches it all with her hands cupping her cheeks, as if in a wonderland. She asks if this happens every night in this place, and she is told by her coach no, the arena normally serves as a home for hockey, concerts and the circus. Phiona has never heard of those things.
She returns to the hotel, which at 15 floors is the tallest building Phiona has ever entered. She rides the elevator with trepidation. She stares out of her room window amazed by how people on the ground look so tiny from the sixth floor. She takes a long shower, washing away the slum.

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PHIONA MUTESI IS the ultimate underdog. To be African is to be an underdog in the world. To be Ugandan is to be an underdog in Africa. To be from Katwe is to be an underdog in Uganda. And finally, to be female is to be an underdog in Katwe.

Read the complete news article here --
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5965666