I play better on smaller screens and think it comes down to the structure of our eyes!

So lately, I'm finding that I play more competitively when I'm on my cell phone instead of at my PC. In my experience, my chances of making a blunder are somewhat greater when I play on my computer monitor (27"), than on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ (6.2"), which is a large screen by cell phone standards but only around 1/14th of the surface area of my computer monitor.

I keep on finding that I play better on my cell phone. Sure, it could be psychological. Maybe I used my cell phone more at the beginning and now I find it more comfortable?

Here's my theory: I am able to keep the entire board within the high-clarity area, or fovea, of my retina when using the smaller screen. Basically, the middle part of our retina is much better at discerning detail that the surrounding area and it's this that allows us to see a crystal clear image, read and perform more complex tasks. It's for this reason that we are unable to read using our peripheral vision.

The fovea centralis, according to Wikipedia:

"The fovea is employed for accurate vision in the direction where it is pointed. It comprises less than 1% of retinal size but takes up over 50% of the visual cortex in the brain.^[11]The fovea sees only the central two degrees of the visual field, (approximately twice the width of your thumbnail at arm's length).^[12]If an object is large and thus covers a large angle, the eyes must constantly shift their gaze to subsequently bring different portions of the image into the fovea (as in reading)." [...or playing chess!]

So, if my fovea is able to take in an area "twice the width of my thumbnail" at arm's length, but I actually hold my phone at approximately half an arm's length when playing chess, it turns out that this is pretty much EXACTLY the size of the chess board when I play on my phone! It's FOUR thumbnail widths. Fascinating!

It feels to me that I can look in the middle of a small screen and my brain is able to take in the whole board position at once whereas, with a larger screen, I have to scan around the board an awful lot to take all of the details in and, if I'm not careful, I can easily miss something.

I've talked to other players about this and quite a few also find they play at their most competitive on their cell phones!

What do you guys think? Your move...

@MitSud: I don't have my phone excessively close to my face or excessively bright, so I don't see why there would be any more stress on my eyes than, say, reading a book.

Or am I missing something?

I play better on my smart phone touch screen than dragging my finger on my laptop's pad.

You know there is a window mode for your internet browser right, so you can change the size of the board on PC. I play with the board at about 1/6th of my screen size (27") anything above this and I start playing much worse