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The Stress of Elite Chess Is Wearing Down the Game’s Champions

Anxiety, loneliness, and paranoia—how a grandmaster comes undone

This is how the story of a great chess grandmaster usually begins.

A parent or teacher discovers an exceptional mind: a memory of shocking precision; a special intuition for geometry; a gift for logic and abstraction. When they are introduced to the game at four or five or six, fluency comes quickly. When that talent is cultivated, others are revealed: monastic discipline, fierce competitiveness, myopic focus.

Chess, for the child, becomes everything. They are transfixed by its beauty, lured by its depth, compelled by the contest. Family, friends, hobbies—all life beyond the board begins to recede.

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The kid is often taken out of school to train full time. They leave home, with or without their family, in search of richer chess cultures and stronger coaches. They argue with their coaches over little details of the game, fall out, hire new ones. With the aid of computer engines, they build an opening repertoire, a set of first moves that will unbalance their opponents. With the aid of classic manuals, they study endgames, chess’s most bedevilling puzzles.

They play and replay the games of their heroes: José Raúl Capablanca, the Cuban champion of the 1920s who achieved computer-like accuracy in the pre-computer age; Bobby Fischer, who struck a blow to the seemingly invincible Soviet chess machine, winning a Cold War proxy battle in the cool Reykjavik summer of 1972; Garry Kasparov, who in 1985 tamed a world champion with his so-called octopus knight. The child dreams of winning the game’s most prestigious events, qualifying for the world championship match, toppling the champ, feeling the weight of the wreath on their shoulders.

They train their bodies as well as their minds to meet the intense demands of a game they come to understand as a sport. Over the board, they fight. Games stretch on for hours, battles of will against other children whose identities, like their own, are tied up with winning. When they lose, they suffer. But their ability to rebound sets them apart once more. The prodigy proves again and again to be the best: in their city, in their country, on their continent.

Maybe, they think, it could be theirs: the world championship, immortality. And then, for all except one, they learn the crushing truth. Someone out there is better.

Life in chess has always been a struggle, never more so than today. During the two-year battle for the 2024 world chess championship, I saw tantrums, I saw tears, I heard one top grandmaster muse about leaving the game for a career in fashion.

In the summer of 2023, in Baku, Azerbaijan, I watched Wesley So, one of America’s top grandmasters, melt down at the board. For weeks, he had been tormented by a racing heart and spiralling thoughts—the manifestations of anxiety and emotional exhaustion, frequent afflictions among top players.

So had been a heavy favourite to place well at the World Cup in Baku. But the tournament had been a slog. Now he sat across the board from his opponent and thought about quitting chess.

His position was falling apart. A knight on the rim, the saying goes, is dim—and So’s horse, stranded on the flank, was proving the maxim. Meanwhile, his opponent’s most powerful pieces were well coordinated in the centre of the board, providing cover for a pawn as it marched inexorably into white territory, threatening to become a queen. By move fifty-three, So’s position was hopeless, and on the brink of elimination, the American resigned.

“Sometimes my mind wanders and won’t co-operate, even when I tell it to,” he told me later. “When it turns off like that, I feel stress because I don’t like to disappoint people.”

Much has been made of the supposed link between chess and mental illness. The notion of a mind tied in knots contemplating the nearly infinite possibilities of a chess game has long inspired giants of literature. In Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense, the grandmaster Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, unable to distinguish between chess and life and seeing threats everywhere, throws himself out of a window. In The Royal Game, Stefan Zweig’s Dr. B, a monastic devotee of chess, is advised by a doctor to stop playing the game, lest his obsessions overwhelm him. In Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit, the world’s best player, Beth Harmon, uses drugs and booze to keep her demons at bay.

The real history of chess, too, is replete with tragic stories of lives undone by delusion and paranoia. Paul Morphy, the nineteenth-century prodigy from New Orleans, who, at twenty-one, established on a tour of Europe that he was the best player in the world, shrank from the game upon his return, becoming increasingly litigious and belligerent, consumed by fantasies that he was surrounded by those who wanted to do him harm. Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official world champion, broke down after losing his crown and never fully recovered, spending the rest of his life in one sanatorium after another. And most famously, Bobby Fischer who, after winning the world title in 1972, disappeared into a........

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