Why do chess players so frequently go insane?

“Chess doesn’t drive people mad – in fact, it keeps mad people sane”

Bill Hartston

I'm sure a certain governmental body will rule that vaccines cause chess players to go insane.

Chess is brutal and bloody. And what gets killed are egos. There are always casualties all the time. And countless people throughout history have died as a result of their egos.

This is pure confirmation bias. There is no greater incident of insanity or suicide among chess players. The whole "genius is next to madness" trope is garbage, used by Hollywood for bad script writing.

reaching in chess at the elite level is dependent on obsessive focus to the point of excluding everything else. Therefore, you are typically deprived of healthy childhood experiences and are more likely to have issues
 
 Claude Bloodgood was a great example. He immersed himself in chess, spending literally thousands of games concurrently. However, his exceptional chess ability and obsessive focus eventually drove him insane, and he started committing crimes, escalating till him murder.

It's Claude, again. He eventually appears in any dysfunction chess thread discussing human abilities

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A short aside, wars are brutal and bloody, chess is a board game. Lets not get carried away and conflate the two.