The Psychology of Chess

The Psychology of Everything

by Fernand Gobet

Do you need to be a genius to be good at chess? What does it take to become a Grandmaster? Can computer programmes beat human intuition in gameplay?

The Psychology of Chess is an insightful overview of the roles of intelligence, expertise, and human intuition in playing this complex and ancient game. The book explores the idea of ‘practice makes perfect’, alongside accounts of why men perform better than women in international rankings, and why chess has become synonymous with extreme intelligence as well as madness.

When artificial intelligence researchers are increasingly studying chess to develop machine learning, The Psychology of Chess shows us how much it has already taught us about the human mind.

Genres: Chess, Psychology, Nonfiction

140 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 14, 2018

Reviews

[Mohamed Al Sayyah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chess is a sport, science and art

[Crackers · Rating 3 out of 5]

"One doesn't have to play well, it's enough to play better than your opponent.”

[Alice Wardle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an accessible introduction to the psychology of chess, covering topics from perception, memory, training, individual differences, and mental health concisely. I think the most interesting and challenging topic discussed was how chess players percieve the chess board compared to non-chess players. I felt as though this information was foundational to most of the other topics in this book; however, I think the template theory, the CHREST architecture, was glossed over without any sort of specific details or clearly described and explained information. It often felt as though interesting concepts were mentioned but it was not really clear how they could be applied practically to chess. The book itself is quite short and is useful as a pointer to other reading, but is a bit challenging and restrictive as a lone book.

Otherwise, it was a good, interesting niche read.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice summary of the psychological literature of chess, the ‘drosophila’ of expertise. The first part contains the cognition behind chess, such as perceptual chunking, improvement spirals, and search trees. The second part covers various topics such as psychological warfare, gender differences and transfer of skill between domains (no far transfer!). Overall, the book covers all my speculation on chess in a succinct way and offers general pedagogical insights that are transferable into non-chess domains. For example, the limits of self-discovery and the importance of deliberate practice in building deep pattern recognition.

[Baybars · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite it explaining many hypotheses & theories in an interesting & understandable way, the way the author explained the research as if he was explaining some story full of plot twists was very annoying.

After explaining some theory and going through all of its details and why it's a revolution in psychology, and after 10 pages of long, useless texts, he goes like "but guess what, the theory was TOTALLY WRONG!!1! Here's why-..." which is very useless and time-consuming.

Most of the content could've been explained in some articles, rather than a book.

[Timothy Ha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather encyclopaedic for this size

This book is rather encyclopaedic for its small size. The author has done a vast research with a lot of contemporary data.

I play chess a lot both online and offline, in my club and tournaments, and always enjoy watching the behaviour and following the lives of my opponents and fellow chess lovers. This book confirms many of my own observations about the process of playing chess and about players.