

High-performance environments in chess
This post was originally published on my lichess blog on 2022-09-19. Here it is on the website for sake of housekeeping. Enjoy! How to think about performance and organise teams and individual environments. How high-performance environments are built in traditional sports Damien Comolli is the Director of Football at Toulouse FC. Before this, he helped…
Reflections on Mental Toughness
Musings and reflections on two modern models of Mental Toughness. What is mental toughness? Intuitively we know the great champions are mentally tough (Magnus is much more likely to win after a loss as Nate calculated) and players that faced adversity and collapsed aren’t. Mentally tough people achieve their challenging goals consistently when confronted with…
Understanding mental fatigue
If you’re going through hell, keep going. Churchill As chess players, we get tired as we play long games, and are more likely to make mistakes when tired. What is fatigue? How to slow down the onset of fatigue? Let’s have a look at the bio-psycho-social model of endurance performance. Bio-psycho-what? How we act when…
Team Chess Analytics: Chess ‘Moneyball’
“I’m not worried about Daryl Morey. He’s one of those idiots who believe in analytics” Charles Barkley Maximising score Team chess is fun – you get to play with your friends and team-mates and compete together and also one of the highest competitive forms of chess: the Olympiad is played every two years between countries…

Dealing with losses: avoid the second arrow
“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterwards, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the…
Shining confidence
From time to time, you stumble upon a foreign language word that describes a concept or an idea you had noticed but had no words for it. When I read the following: If you see any of the great Tibetan teachers, they appear radiant even in very simple robes. This radiance that shines forth is…
Podcast Appearance: 64 A Chess podcast
I would like to thank David Vizgand for having me on his podcast and hope you will enjoy our conversation: https://rss.com/podcasts/64chess/357167/

Chess team rotation: what can we learn from Manchester United?
“I need a 6-month holiday, twice a year”Alireza Firouzja’s t-shirt. The 2021 European Chess Team Championship is currently underway in Slovenia and the French Chess Federation has been posting a series of very interesting ‘Behind the scenes’ Videos – we gain insight into the team dynamics, and the ups and downs of the performances. The…

A Lesson in Resilience: the Infinite Game of the Roman Republic
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” James P. Carse Punic wars: Rome vs Carthage You have probably heard of the Roman Empire. Before the Emprice, Rome was a republic led by two elected consuls. It fought long wars with Carthage, another…

Musashi: what can we learn from the greatest swordsman of all time?
‘I have put my life on the line many times in combat. I have learned the Way of the Sword by risking everything in the divide between life and death. ‘ ‘The victor is already determined before the fight even begins.’ Miyamoto Musashi is indisputably the greatest swordsman of all times. Born in Japan in…
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