Psychology and Chess

I have a chess psychology booklist if you are interested.

A lot of people say this and don't seem to realise that there were chess games involved.

What you call ridiculous (twice), many people call legitimate psychological measures. However, perhaps the kind of thing you are looking for is the selection of moves that make your opponent uncomfortable. There are many examples of this, especially out of the opening. Your opponent is trying to play a simple, safe game and you play perhaps a worse line which introduces many complications. Or they're trying to play tactically and you play positional moves, turning away tactical ones which may provide you clear inroads at advantage. Furthermore, you might play positional moves when your opponenet expects you to play tactical ones (or vice versa) to get in their head; they second-guess themselves and think that maybe they have missed something, that you know something they don't.

The Fischer example is not a very good one because it's cheap tactics that have little to do with the game itself and everything to do with disrupting your opponent's pattern outside of the game.  Why stop there -- how about some itching powder in your opponent's underwear?  Maybe some lifesavers in the shower head?  None of this is psychology as it pertains to chess.

Psychology in the game itself would, to me at least, be a situation where you choose one move or strategy over another because of the psychological impact it has on a player.  Choosing a slow agonizing grind over a potentially faster tactical approach in part of a game that could call for either would be an example with the former likely taking more of a psychological toll on your opponent that could carry over to subsequent games.  If you can gainand keep the initiative this can also have an affect over and above the actual advantage it gives you on the board -- keeping your opponent on the defensive for a long period can change their mindset and how they approach the game and make them hesitant to attack.

I think examples such as these are what GaryMossu is looking for.

Kasparov is a master to use psycology in chess too.

Do you remember when they asked him on the newspaper about his fear to meet Nigel Short and he said: "How can I feel affraid about somebody called Short?", don't you think this is a psycologic attack before the match start?

Please see my blog post.

http://fromtheislandofbaltimore.blogspot.com/2009/04/brown-mega-center-for-chess-research.html

It's a nice long list of chess psychology books and some books on chess computers and a work of chess fiction thrown in just because. Let me know if you have any questions on any of these books. They are all nearby on the shelf.

If psychology is the study of the individual in his/her environment, then chess psychology deals with the study of the chess player in the chess environenment.

Let me know if you have any other titles to add to the list. There are still a lot of books out there on the subject that I have not yet managed to get my hands on. AND there are numerous articles on the internet on chess and psychology. 

You can search google scholar and google books for "chess psychology" and see just how many scholarly writings there are on the subject.

The Krogius book is worth buying.

Chess psychologyis = retarted. Kasparov would beat anyone in the world with or without it. Fischer was austisitc his whole life which contributed to his paranoia. Your all reading much to much into this. Make good moves win. Make bad moves lose. Thats what to focus on...

 Yes, what you can only do as far as psyching out opponents is to use cheap tricks, people who do that are low in self confidence in their chess abilities, they need to do it.  It only works if you are allow yourself to work it against you, other than that it's pretty much a waste of time....