Our Process
Foundational Principles
Here are several crucial ideas this chess psychology framework is built on. Enjoy!
Emotional Reasoning
In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are treated as a connected loop. Blundering, for instance, can come even when you have the knowledge and time to calculate. These are known as distortions. Thoughts like "I'm losing anyway, so why bother", for example, can trigger strong emotions that pull your mind out of calculation. One of the most common distortions in that loop is that players will treat an emotion as evidence about the position instead of a distraction.
Catching that pattern during a game is a skill that requires training. These thoughts fire automatically and quickly, often before you notice it. By properly distinguishing between threats on the board and emotional stress, real growth begins.
Negative cognitions and occupying mental bandwidth
It’s important that we also address the impact that emotions have on move choice. Anger is a key example of this. Anger shows up, it turns into a thought ("I'm playing badly"), and the natural next move is to sit with that thought instead of the position. These are called negative cognitions. Many students conflate this thought with constructive self-reflection.
In truth, ruminating and evaluating use the resource of time! Every second spent on the thought is a second interrupting or muddying your read of the board. The move that finally gets played is often not answering the position. It answers the discomfort and brings only short-term relief. One can think of this as a chess player’s denial. To properly face a problem means to face it head-on. But how do we work through the problem now that we see it?
Translation and Execution
Imagine a chess player. Constantly complaining about getting winning positions, but "whenever I get ahead I lose on time or blunder on low time!" How do we translate this into something constructive? Good chess needs a certain amount of processing to find a good move. Once time runs short, that budget gets cut.
What's telling is what gets lost first isn't just the hard, complicated stuff. They're actually simple and should survive the cut. Why are masters dropping entire pieces in time trouble?? That's assumed as a given, but worth reflecting on. If something that basic falls apart under pressure, it's a sign of how much time pressure interferes with thinking, not just how much time is left on the clock.
The work-through is similar to that of trauma, which is to limit the amount of information you take in so you can make correct, committal decisions. This is easier said than done…
Grounded in cognitive principles
A Master’s in Marriage & Family Therapy means every technique offered is rooted in years of training, up-to-date research on mental health, cultural competence, and a specific personal theory of change.
Competitive credibility
As an Expert-class player, I’ve sat across the board under real pressure, strong enough to compete seriously and grounded enough to stay in touch with how most players actually experience the game, the product of decades of lived competition.
Access, not just elite play
Outreach, both local and international, shaped a conviction to connect with the player across the board, chess as a vehicle for connection, never something worth sacrificing that connection for. Working across cultures means meeting each community, family, and player on its own terms.
Why Chess?
Chess is an honest game. A good move earns its result and a strong idea holds up on the board every time, that clarity is part of what makes chess such a rewarding place to grow.
It’s also one of the most welcoming tools available for that kind of growth: low-cost, easy to access, and played in nearly every country and culture on earth. With practice, anyone can improve, whatever their age, background, or personality. That mix of honest feedback and open access makes chess a near-perfect template for building real confidence and self-understanding.
Relevant Research
- 1. The effects of time pressure on chess skill: An investigation into fast and slow processes underlying expert performance. PubMed. View source
- 2. Neural correlates of chess expertise: A systematic review of brain imaging studies comparing expert versus novice players. ScienceDirect. View source
- 3. Strategic Decision-Making and Expertise in Chess: An Engine-Based and Behavioral Analysis Across Skill Levels. International Journal of Social Science Research and Review. View source
- 4. Electroencephalographic response of chess players in decision-making processes under time pressure. ResearchGate. View source
- 5. Thinking and depression: I. Idiosyncratic content and cognitive distortions. Archives of General Psychiatry (JAMA Network). View source
- 6. The efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy: A review of meta-analyses. Cognitive Therapy and Research (Springer). View source
- 7. Cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety and related disorders: A meta-analysis of randomized placebo-controlled trials. PubMed. View source
- 8. About the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. View source
- 9. Adverse childhood experiences and associated health outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. ScienceDirect. View source
- 10. Tilt in esports: Understanding the phenomenon in new digital contexts. ScienceDirect. View source
A note on scope: this work draws on real therapeutic training and technique, but it is not therapy. The Center for Chess Psychology is a chess psychology practice, not a mental health provider, and nothing here should be taken as a substitute for licensed mental health care.