ACADEMIA Letters

Mated by Madness - Psychosis and Chess Grand Masters

Robert Kaplan, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Wollongong, Australia

Imagination does not breed insanity…Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.

GK Chesterton[1]

I have always been fascinated by all types of monomania, by persons wrapped up

in a single idea; for the stricter the limits a man sets for himself, the more clearly
he approaches the eternal.

Stefan Zweig: The Royal Game

Cult shows come and go, but one likely to have a lasting impact is the series The Queen’s
Gambit. With the enticing Anna Taylor-Joy in the lead role it has rekindled excitement last
seen in 1972 when the Bobby Fischer craze got millions of people to set out the 32 pieces and
test their mettle in a battle over 64 squares that could go on for hours, days or even longer.
Chess, the most challenging intellectual game in the world, gets increasingly rigorous as
the quality of the play increases. The game regularly produces genius players. The ultimate
competitions are held between Grand Masters who are regarded (not least in Russia) as equiv-
alent to the highest level athletes.
32 pieces on a 64-square board…the complexities can be maddening, requiring one to
anticipate actions dozens, if not hundreds, of moves ahead and it is no surprise that many give
up at beginner or club level.
Maddening is the key word. Chess at the highest level is associated with madness to a
significant extent, leading to an ongoing debate: do you need to be mad to be a chess master;
or, does being a chess champion drive you mad? Another view is that for some, playing chess
keeps madness at bay.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Robert Kaplan, rob@rkaplan.com.au

Citation: Kaplan, R. (2021). Mated by Madness - Psychosis and Chess Grand Masters. Academia Letters,
Article 2363. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2363.

1
 Sedentary it is, but chess must be regarded as the most dangerous game in view of the high
psychiatric morbidity in those who are utterly obsessed to succeed regardless of the price to
be paid. The high rate of psychotic disorders in chess masters has frequently been observed.
In addition, there is a high rate of suicide – some say the highest in the world.[2]Grandmaster
suicides include Alvis Vitolins, Karen Grigoryan, Norman Von Lennep, Curt von Bardeleben
(whose demise inspired Nabokov’s book The Defence), Lembit Oll, Georgy Ilivitsky, Pertti
Poutiainen and Shankar Roy.[3] Each of them has their own tragic story, syphilis was present
in some but playing chess at the highest level was the common factor.
Many will recall the psychic meltdown of Bobby Fischer who beat – no, annihilated –
Boris Spassky in 1972 to win the world championship (in addition to being a poster boy for the
US in the Cold War), then spiralled down into outright paranoia. Fischer had won the US Open
Chess Championship at age fourteen before embarking in an unstoppable race to conquer the
Soviet Chess School, led at that time by Botvinnik. His strange behaviour was evident from an
early age. When it was suggested that he see a psychiatrist Fischer responded, with immense
self-confidence , that “a psychiatrist ought to pay (me) for the privilege of working on (my)
brain.”
After the world championship it was only downhill. Fischer’s impossible behaviour es-
calated into outright paranoia, he joined an obscure sect (and soon fell out with them), lived
in the streets for a while, developed an overweening hatred for the United States and Jews
(Fischer was Jewish himself), ensconced himself in Japan and the Philippines. In addition, he
went to cheer on the 9/11 bombers which went down a treatment in his home country. With
one exception he never played serious chess again.[4] On the run from the US, he was given
honorary citizenship in Finland (where he had won the world championship), dying of renal
failure at 64.
Fischer, to no surprise, attracted a grab-bag of diagnoses, including Asperger’s Syndrome
(actually the former, since abolished by the myrmidons of the DSM), paranoid personality
disorder and schizoid personality.[5] A pointless exercise without Fischer’s cooperation, but
there is no doubt that he was psychotic and that puts him in that category of chess greats who
paid the ultimate price for their genius. As would be expected, Fischer lacked any insight and
vehemently denied that there was anything wrong with his mental state and attitudes.
One of the first players of note to be so affected, prior to the era of chess masters, was the
American player Paul Morphy. Invincible at the age of twelve, in an astonishingly short run,
Morphy went on to demolish all the top players in America and Europe, seemingly without
effort. Nine years later, he became the virtual world champion, facing and emerging victorious
in games with the European elite of chess players from the second half of the 19th Century,
including the great Anderssen. Such was his aura that no less than Staunton, the champion

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Robert Kaplan, rob@rkaplan.com.au

Citation: Kaplan, R. (2021). Mated by Madness - Psychosis and Chess Grand Masters. Academia Letters,
Article 2363. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2363.

2
British chess player, avoided his challenge, citing Morphy’s young age and lack of experience
as a feeble excuse.
When the Civil War started, Morphy’s constant talk about chess drove away any clients,
after which his mental state collapsed. He was obsessed that he was being persecuted by
his brother-in-law (whose name was not David Greenglass). Morphy wandered the streets
of New Orleans, talking loudly about his persecutory delusions. When his mother, brother
and a friend tried to commit him to the Louisiana Retreat, he threatened to sue them before
convincing the owners that he was sane and being released. After this Morphy spent his time
in the streets and died at the age of 47, rumoured to be lying in his bathtub surrounded by a
circle of women’s shoes.[6] Even for those times, his age at death was low, leaving the question
whether there was an undetected brain disorder.
The morbid travails of Morphy and Bobby Fischer can be viewed in parallel. The two
players had a prodigious ascent to reach the top, then leaving competitive chess to enter a
period of ostracism and seclusion, during which both developed severe paranoid psychoses.
Both had delusions of property damage and poisoning – in the case of Morphy – and perse-
cution/conspiracy in the case of Fischer.
For Queen’s Gambit fans, comparisons with Fisher’s life are inevitable. Change Fisher’s
gender, give her a drug problem rather than a paranoid psychosis, fight your way through the
entrenched hostility of the chess establishment, especially the Russians, and you have it all
there – Fischer redivivus as it were.
But Fischer and Morphy are far from alone. A brief selection of psychotic grand masters
includes Wilhelm Steinitz, Akiba Rubinstein and Carlos Torre-Repetto. Wilhelm Steinitz,
perhaps the greatest chess player of the nineteenth century, was prone to telling people that
he had played chess with god – and won. Modestly of this type, not unknown in the world
of grand chess, does not in itself qualify Steinitz as mad but there was more to follow. His
physique, being barely 5 feet tall and having congenital lameness, may account for his violent
temper and intolerance.[7]
Steinitz was unbeaten from 1862 to 1894, a phenomenal record. In addition, his 1889
textbook The Modern Chess Instructor was a serious attempt to identify the fundamentals of
the game (and still worth reading).[8]But it could not last. After holding the top places in
every tournament he played, he unexpectedly came eleventh in London in June 1989. His
health in disarray, he returned to the USA and his mental state was never the same.
Steinitz became gripped by intractable delusions. He tried to contact God to play a match,
benevolently offering the odds of a pawn-and-move to his opponent (who lost). He claimed
that he could move chess pieces around by emitting electric currents and would spend each
morning walking barefoot in the small yard behind his New York home trying to call friends

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Robert Kaplan, rob@rkaplan.com.au

Citation: Kaplan, R. (2021). Mated by Madness - Psychosis and Chess Grand Masters. Academia Letters,
Article 2363. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2363.

3
overseas with his “wireless phone”, a silver box held to his ear. In 1900 his wife committed
him to the insane asylum at the Manhattan State Hospital, Ward’s Island, New York.[9] It
was reported that he had contracted syphilis, but this remains to be confirmed.[10] He died a
pauper in August 1900 of a heart attack.
Akiba Rubinstein was described as the most visionary chess player since José Raul Ca-
pablanca. His match against Rotlewi in 1907 is considered to be one of the best games of all
time, and his endgame play is still studied by many. However, it was not to last and Rubin-
stein’s wins faded away. He moved to Brussels and in 1937 Hans Kmoch visited to invite
him to a tournament in Holland. Their meeting was brief and unsuccessful. Mrs Rubinstein
warned him: if a visitor doesn’t leave soon, Rubinstein himself might leave, possibly through
the window.
After the invasion of Belgium by the Germans in 1940, Rubinstein, as a Jew, was at risk of
deportation to the Nazi death camps. It is anecdotally held that Rubinstein expressed delight
when invited to work in a concentration camp, to which the Gestapo concluded that Rubinstein
was insane and left him alone. A variant account is that he was already in a sanitorium. The
first story is more doubtful but neither Rubinstein nor his family were deported.[11]
When his wife died in 1954, Rubinstein’s mind collapsed. He no longer washed, shaved,
cut his hair, changed his clothes or ever spoke. He spent his final years in a sanatorium for the
aged, no longer using a chess set but regularly analysing games without a board, otherwise
remaining silent until his death 1961, a man whose mind resembled a board from which the
pieces had been removed.
Carlos Torre-Repetto, Mexico’s greatest player and first grandmaster, had a spectacular
career that made him a celebrity in his home country. His family fled to New Orleans to
escape the revolution where his rapid rise commenced, drawing with no less than Capablanca
and even beating Lasker on his way to grandmaster status. But it was not to last. In 1962
Torre-Repetto had a breakdown that commenced with him stripping naked on a Fifth Avenue
bus in New York City (but surely not the first or last to do this). He was briefly institutionalized
before returning to his native Mexico, kept in a Merida nursing home, never to play again.[12]
He faded into obscurity, only remembered by the chess community for his opening game the
Torre Attack.
Some attributed the breakdown to a ‘Dear John’ letter from his fiancé, surely just a precip-
itating factor.[13] More aptly his friend Dr Carlos Fruvas Gárnica blamed Torre’s psychosis
on the pressures of being a world-class player, especially in a country like Mexico where he
was taken up by the rich and famous as a celebrity toy to exhibit, somewhat akin to the way
Nijinsky, another psychotic, was led around social gatherings by Diaghilev.[14]
In 1975, when a journalist asked Torre Repetto why he retired from chess at his peak,

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Robert Kaplan, rob@rkaplan.com.au

Citation: Kaplan, R. (2021). Mated by Madness - Psychosis and Chess Grand Masters. Academia Letters,
Article 2363. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2363.

4
he summed up the beauty and torment that chess has for those who immerse themselves in
it: “Chess is science because it has its own standards, its precise mathematical mechanism
whose errors are quite tangible and in which the best paths are progressively discovered, and
the wrong variants are technically checked. But it is also art; there is not a single path — or a
best one — to follow, but each path fits the personality of its author, and therefore, it is a way
of expressing beauty, for which passion and true inspiration are required.”
Psychosis, of course, is not infectious (but can be caused by infections like syphilis or
encephalitis), so the coeval proximity of Raymond Weinstein and Bobby Fischer would not
have caused the former’s madness as much as his sinking into the frantic nidus of high level
chess. Weinstein was at the same Brooklyn school as Fischer and followed him step by step
up the US chess ladder, leaving fans to wonder whether there was something in the Brooklyn
water. Many regarded him as the next talent to match Fischer. Weinstein finished third behind
Fischer in the 1960/61 US championship and won a number of games playing for the US team.
But it was not to last.
Qualifying as a psychologist in 1963, aged 22, Weinstein went to Graduate School in
Amsterdam where he attacked professor and chess master Johan Barendregt. Deported back
to the US, he cut the throat of his 83-year-old roommate at a halfway house. Declared too
insane to stand trial, he was institutionalised in the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Centre on Wards
Island, where he remains to this day.[15]
Studies on the psychology of chess show that players tend to be more introverted, intimate
and intuitive. Expert players have the ability to copy and recall positions due to storage in
long-memory of different patterned clusters of pieces or chunks (the Chunking Theory).[16]
Studies show the amygdala has a critical role in decision making.[17] And several studies
showing that chess playing is helpful for treating schizophrenic and ADHD patients are of
interest, but remain to be tested.[18] [19]
What kind of mental cogitation is needed to consider thousands of possible moves ly-
ing ahead, all affecting the next move to be chosen while the clock is remorselessly ticking
away? In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga describes play as essential as reflection for human
beings.[20] According to Huizinga, games create order by having rules and limits in time and
space, foster social relationships, simulate reality, and captivate by generating tension and
competitiveness. These features are present in chess to a high degree with the rider that any
activity taken to such extremes can trigger mental dysfunction when done excessively.
“Kotov’s Syndrome” refers to the situation in which a chess player, after studying a com-
plicated position in great depth for a long time and failing to find a suitable variant, notices
that he is running out of time and quickly makes a move that he has not yet analyzed and is of-
ten incorrect, thereafter losing the game.[21] This situation clearly involves decision making

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Robert Kaplan, rob@rkaplan.com.au

Citation: Kaplan, R. (2021). Mated by Madness - Psychosis and Chess Grand Masters. Academia Letters,
Article 2363. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2363.

5
and emotional intelligence.
Attempts to understand the psychopathology of chess has attracted many, an early example
being the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones who turned his attention to Paul Morphy.[22] Jones
linked the warfare-like aspects of chess with anal-sadistic tendencies, a predictable line for an
analyst of that time, and sees Morphy’s breakdown as a homosexual cathexis being sublimated.
One can make of this what one wishes (even modern analysts do not give this kind of thinking
much credence) but it is doubtful whether you get any closer to understanding what happened
to Morphy.
Not for the first time, rather more insight into the mentality of chess players has come from
artists than scientists. The chess migration of Marcel Duchamp, arguably the most influential
artist of the twentieth century, is a stellar example of the sheer appeal of the game to the
brilliant individual, whether artistic or intellectual.[23] In 1923, at the age of 36, Duchamp
departed his last masterpiece The Large Glass (left permanently unfinished) and turned forever
to chess. Duchamp had played since his youth and his interest can be seen in his paintings
The Chessplayers (1910) and The Portrait of Chessplayers (1911).
Despite being at an age when top players were considered to be too old, Duchamp was
no hack, becoming a Chess Master, representing France in the Olympiads and writing widely
about the game. Realising that he would never quite make it to the top, he became active
in fundraising and organising games.[24] In compensation, the Oxford Companion to Chess
described him as the most highly esteemed artist to play chess at Master level
Duchamp never went mad but such was his obsession with the game that his wife glued
his pieces to the board (in some ways, quite an interesting end game strategy) so he could pay
more attention to her. Nevertheless, they parted after six months.[25]
Madness in chess greats cannot be entirely attributed to the strain of the great game.
Poverty, family demands and chess politics all take their toll; in some cases, grander poli-
tics, notably with the Russians[26], enacts its own pressure. Throw in drugs and alcohol, if
not syphilis (in times past) and the die is cast for a race between the ultimate grandmaster
success and psychological dissolution.
Stefan Zweig’s novella The Royal Game (also known as Schachnovelle)
– the best literary work on the game – fulminates that the “ridiculous goal of backing a
wooden king into the corner of a wooden board” is best avoided to preserve your sanity. Chess
causes madness and may explain why some people are irresistibly drawn to the game.
Whether future Grand Masters will listen to this warning is unlikely. What can be said
with certainty is that the challenges of high-level chess will only increase now that computers
have been introduced as players and the human competitors will always be prepared to push
themselves beyond the limit that can hold sanity.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Robert Kaplan, rob@rkaplan.com.au

Citation: Kaplan, R. (2021). Mated by Madness - Psychosis and Chess Grand Masters. Academia Letters,
Article 2363. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2363.

6
 Duchamp summed it up best: “Chess is a sport — a violent sport. This detracts from its
most artistic connexions… If anything it is like a struggle”.

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[2] See: Franklin GL, Pereira BNGV, Lima NSC, Germiniani FMB, Camargo CHF, Caramelli
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[4] Chun, R. (2002). Bobby Fischer’s pathetic endgame. The Atlantic Monthly, December,
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[5] Franklin GL, Pereira BNGV, Lima NSC, Germiniani FMB, Camargo CHF, Caramelli P,
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[6] https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/editorial/the-most-dangerous-game. Accessed 12 July

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[13] Velasco G. The Life and Chess Games of Carlos Torre: Mexico’s First Grandmaster.
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Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Robert Kaplan, rob@rkaplan.com.au

Citation: Kaplan, R. (2021). Mated by Madness - Psychosis and Chess Grand Masters. Academia Letters,
Article 2363. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2363.

7
[14] Jiménez-Ruiz A, Ruiz-Razura A. Searching for Carlos Torre Repetto: the enigmatic life
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[19] Blasco-Fontecilla H, Gonzalez-Perez M, Garcia-Lopez R, Poza-Cano B, Perez-Moreno

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[20] Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Switzerland: Routledge; 1944.

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[26] Moul, C. C., & Nye, J. V. C. (2009). Did the Soviets collude? A statistical analysis
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Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Robert Kaplan, rob@rkaplan.com.au

Citation: Kaplan, R. (2021). Mated by Madness - Psychosis and Chess Grand Masters. Academia Letters,
Article 2363. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2363.