A series in 41 articles
The psychology of chess
Chess produces a rare kind of information: an unambiguous defeat, with no teammate to pin it on, no element of luck, public and frequent. That is what makes it the best observation ground there is for understanding how a brain handles what contradicts it.
Every article opens on a scene from a game, cites the founding study and its critique, and ends with one thing to do. Several classics you think you know did not survive replication: that gets said every time.
8 of 41 articles published.
The Core: Why the Brain Protects Its Self-Image
Six mechanisms that fire in a precise order, before, during and after every game. The series hub closes them out.
- Why Your Brain Prefers Being Right Over Learning
- The Dunning-Kruger Effect in Chess: What 3,388 Players Reveal About Your Confidence Think your rating doesn't reflect your real strength? A 2025 study put the question to 3,388 tournament players. On average, they believe they're 89 Elo points above their actual rating. Here's why, and why that famous curve you've seen everywhere is a fake.
- Cognitive Dissonance in Chess: Why You Say "I Was Winning" Losing creates a mental discomfort the brain wants to switch off as fast as possible. Usually it doesn't switch off the loss: it switches off what the loss means. That's how the most-spoken sentence in chess gets born.
- Confirmation Bias
- Defense Mechanisms in Chess: The Complete Inventory Five players lose the same game. The first snaps a piece, the second blames the clock, the third lectures at length about the theory, the fourth laughs about it, the fifth writes down what he missed. Those are five defenses, and psychiatry has ranked them by maturity.
- Rationalization
- Projection
Biases of Judgment
What distorts your evaluation of a position, a move or an opponent.
- The Halo Effect
- Survivorship Bias in Chess: The Graveyard You Never See Opening theory is built on the games that got published. Grandmaster advice comes from the people who became grandmasters. Out of 502,000 rated players, roughly 1,750 hold the title. Everything you learn comes from the survivors.
- Loss Aversion
- Anchoring Bias
- The Barnum Effect
Self-Sustaining Loops
Beliefs that produce the very facts meant to verify them.
- The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- Learned Helplessness
- Social Comparison
The Group
What the presence of others does to your play, and what it does to the community.
- Crowd Psychology
- Conformity
- Obedience to Authority
- The Bystander Effect
Motivation and Discipline
Why you train, why you stop, and why the plans don't hold.
- Self-Determination Theory
- Intrinsic Motivation
- Delayed Gratification
- Habit Formation
Influence and Manipulation
The seven levers of persuasion, applied to the chess market and to the board.
- The Psychology of Persuasion
- Reciprocity
- Social Proof
- Scarcity
- Emotional Manipulation
- Gaslighting in Chess: When Someone Rewrites Your Own Game In chess, the truth is archived move by move. It's the only game where you can prove what actually happened. And yet it's remarkably fertile ground for a form of manipulation that consists of making someone doubt their own perception.
Reading the Other Player
Modelling an opponent, and spotting when you fill that model with yourself.
- Theory of Mind
- Emotional Intelligence
Memory
How the memory of a game gets rebuilt, and what you lose in the process.
- Reconstructive Memory
- False Memories
Learning and the Body
Conditioning, beliefs and the physiology of performance.
- Classical Conditioning
- Operant Conditioning
- No, Chess Doesn't Rewire Your Brain London taxi drivers, jugglers, grey matter getting bigger: the two studies always cited to prove that chess transforms the brain actually say the opposite of what they're made to say. The detail nobody reports changes everything.
- The Placebo Effect in Chess: Why Your Lucky Charm Doesn't Work Believing you've taken caffeine really does raise a cyclist's power output by 3.1%. But research shows the placebo works very well on effort and pain, and very badly on objective cognitive performance. Chess is exactly the wrong terrain.
- Chronic Stress
Status, Choice, Attachment
What a permanent rating does to a person, and what keeps them in the game.
- The Psychology of Status
- The Paradox of Choice
- Attachment Theory in Chess: The Parent Behind the Door Chess is one of the rare competitions where the adult can't watch. The child goes in alone, plays alone, loses alone, and comes back out to a face that saw nothing. What attachment theory says about that moment explains a lot of quitting.