ChessFeels #40: We need to talk about how we (don't) talk about chess and mental health
Ian Nepomniatchi deserves better than this
Is there a German word for witnessing someone lose a match by cracking under psychological pressure so painfully that you feel as if you, yourself, were the one losing the match? If not, there’s a Russian-ish word now: Nepomniatchi-itis. Too bad ‘nepotism’ is taken.
Anyways, writing immediately after the conclusion of game 9, Magnus leads the match 6-3, with three wins, six draws, and zero losses. He needs only 7.5 points to clinch the match, with a maximum of five games remaining.
While neither the score, nor the trajectory (six draws, one very grueling win, two more wins in the next three games as Ian runs out of steam/goes on tilt) were totally shocking, the way Magnus has picked up wins two and three is. In each game, Ian has made relatively straight-forward, unforced one-move blunders. I don’t mean ‘blunders that could cost a grandmaster a game’. I mean, especially in round 9, blunders. Like, stuff you and I play in our blitz games blunders. To the point where it was Magnus shaking his head, in disbelief, after seeing how Ian allowed his bishop to get trapped with a full 50 minutes (and 30 minutes more than Magnus) on his clock.
All you can do is smile. The challenger after his round 8 collapse, in which he apologized to the spectators for delivering a performance which he deemed sub-grandmaster strength.
Photo: Maria Emelianova/Chess.com
I don’t want to talk about the moves today. Although Ian played quite well until The Move. I want to talk about the press conference after. Or, more specifically, I want to ask why in the world was there a press conference after this game. I can’t help but wonder, as he chose to not resign when down an entire piece, whether he was just buying himself more time before he had to face an onslaught of horrible questions. That’s just projection, though.
More generally, the last few years have been great for athletes speaking out about mental health, particularly tennis star and overall icon Naomi Osaka refusing to take part in press conferences after grueling matches. Her explanation was that she has struggled with depression, and the way these press conferences were done certainly did not help. She was not the only one who felt this way, but knew she was a prominent enough name to potentially draw attention to the issue, rather than just be fined into oblivion, if she called attention to it.
Again, I can’t reach into Nepo’s head and tell you how he felt when, after today’s game, a reporter asked him if he cut off his signature ‘man bun’ in homage to how samurais would cut off their hair after a defeat in battle. I can’t tell you what it was like for him to sit there as the host of the press conference, GM Maurice Ashley, asked Magnus why he chose the word ‘absurd’ to describe the challenger’s blunder. But I can ask what any of this serves, other than maybe some click-bait-y headlines and meme fodder.
The morbid fascination with the mental collapse, the psychological breakdown that precedes the error, makes sense enough. It might be the most relatable part of this whole event to the average viewer. We’ll never play in world championship matches. But we will miss simple tactics, especially when we start to put more pressure on how we ‘have’ to win this particular game for whatever reason. But there’s a significant difference, I think, between having the discourse on the psychology of chess, on the one hand, and the sort of semi-well-intentioned schadenfreude that comes from seeing one of them do something like one of us.
I worry that this tendency, more than it affects someone like Nepomniatchi who already feels plenty horrible without our tweets, thanks, has a negative affect on chess discourse more generally. I have seen chess streams where students are subjected to excruciatingly challenging puzzles in order to, from what I can tell, generate more engaging content for viewers. I’ve seen so much ‘trolling’ around blunders made in meaningless online games that most players, myself have included, have internalized shame around just…f**king up…in a way that is just not serving anybody.
If there could be a more productive discussion around why and how these sorts of mental collapses happen, what, if anything, we could do about them, and just generally a safe space for chess players to feel vulnerable enough sharing what it actually felt like, there would be, I’m guessing here, less general anger, frustration, and bottled-up, inexpressible despair in the chess world. But there would also be fewer memes and videos of Hikaru getting really mad on his stream. So who’s to say if a more inclusive, productive discourse around mental health in chess is good or bad. And I’m not pretending to be immune from mining tragedy for content, either (although there the joke was that any of that was prep…).
I don’t have solutions today. But, throughout this year, I have made several close, brilliant friends in the chess space who are more emotionally honest and open than anybody I had met previously. I’m optimistic that, in time, we can all build a culture that is less parasitic on psychological collapse and more mutually supportive. I even might be starting a podcast with one of these close friends who might be a psychologist, and we might be starting it in order to really dive into these issues and how a better world could be possible. But today, all I have are some of Nepo’s sickest games:
Take care of yourself.
JJ