Why did top chess players lose their minds?
What was up with that?
shareNot all. There are quite a few who were normal by most standards. I will admit, myself included, anybody who is a die hard chess fanatic does tend to have their own idiosyncrasies.
shareThere are a few top chess players who over the years have developed mental illnesses. Paul Morphy, Wilhelm Steinitz, and Bobby Fischer, to name a few. There are others who were or became very unpleasant people in their lives, like Alexander Alekhine.
However most top chess players are normal, rational people, and have a wide variety of personalities. Common to the very top players, Kasparov, Karpov, Magnus Carlsen, is an incredible work ethic, combined with a tremendous memory, and a natural talent for the game.
However, the very nature of the game, tends to draw obsessives, or people who have addictive personalities, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that some of the best players were a little eccentric or had issues with mental health at some point in their lives.
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Very well said. But I don't think it's the nature of the game that tends to draw obsessive people, I think the game makes you obsessive.
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To be fair, because of the nature of the game it tends to lead to somewhat paranoid thinking, speaking as someone who loves the game and played at a reasonably high level, in order to be good enough to play at tournament level, against Grandmasters you need to work very hard on your game constantly to remain in touch with current theory and keep sharp.
Devoting that amount of time to what is essentially a game tends to draw people who are obsessive. I also agree with you that chess can exacerbate any mental instability :)
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Which is why I hated Searching For Bobby Fischer. If the boy had to succeed in chess he had to obsess about it, his mother's insistence that he have a 'normal' life pretty much ensured that he would never fulfil his potential.
If all the great chess players and musicians of our times had parents who insisted their life should be 'normal' in the sense they shouldn't spend every living hour obsessing about what they were good at, we wouldn't have any of the geniuses that we see.
I think another thing to consider is that the nature of the game. You are constantly on the lookout for the other person trying to trap you, or out-smart you which does lead to paranoid thinking.
If you are a rational or balanced person, you can leave the board and leave this kind of thinking behind, but others may not be able to leave this behind and consequently it bleeds into their thinking when they aren't at the chessboard.
One can obsess about the game, and still retain one's sanity, but as has been shown in the past with some players like Morphy or Steinitz, it can lead to eccentric behaviour...
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There are a few top chess players who over the years have developed mental illnesses. Paul Morphy, Wilhelm Steinitz, and Bobby Fischer, to name a few. There are others who were or became very unpleasant people in their lives, like Alexander Alekhine.
Morphy didn't lose his mind. He retired in his prime undefeated and with no one in sight as a decent challenger.
Morphy came from a very wealthy family and in his time, chess was seen as a gambler's low-life profession. However, he got hooked into the game and went on a 15-year invincibility period, beating everyone all over America and Europe. He would defeat his rivals so brutally, that he began giving pawn odds (playing with one less pawn) to his opponents, sometimes even pieces (a knight, a bishop). Still, that didn't stop him from clubbering his rivals.
In the end, Morphy couldn't find anyone who could at least come close enough to play evenly against him, so he retired from chess and became a lawyer. Unfortunately, being wealthy and in no need for money, his law practice didn't do well, especially when most visitors/clients were only interested in playing or talking about chess with Morphy.
He died of a sudden heart attack after taking a cold bath in a hot summer day.
Oh and by the way.
Alekhine didn't lose his mind either. He was simply a 54 year old living in reclusive apartment in Portugal hiding after six years of WW2. He was getting ready to defend his title when he died. share
I think Morphy was bitter because Howard Staunton - who was regarded by many as the strongest player in the world until 1850 or so - refused a match with him. The British Champion said he was occupied with his literary pursuits (he was a well-known Shakespearean scholar) but some people said he was dodging Morphy.
The film said he committed suicide (wrong) and "died surrounded by ladies' shoes". I am not sure about the significance of the last part since Morphy was living with his sister. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to suggest that Morphy was like Eddie's character in Danish Girl.
No, it has been well documented that Morphy had several pairs of girls and women's shoes near his bathtub and had a certain ritual in dealing with them.
The place where Morphy died has become a restaurant and one can now visit there, along with his family house down the street, along with his grave. I believe him to be the best American chessplayer after Fischer. However, Morphy never believed in the profession of chess, he believed it to be a "gentlemen's " game.
Alekhine was a Nazi collaborator during WWII and wrote several anti-Semetic articles. He only went to Portugal after the end of the war.
He was in Spain a couple of years before the end.Quite a few chess players wound up mentally ill
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