When we founded Mind Over Moves, one of my commitments as a co-founder was to renew my relationship with playing chess. My connection with chess began in an unconventional way. My parents owned and operated two small businesses when I was young. We owned a restaurant and haulage companies. My parents worked long hours, and it was a time in England when children were seen and not heard. In my case, I spent most of my time outside of school in the company of adults in our businesses and on trips with my parents around England to different depots and markets, except for Saturdays and semester breaks during the school year. The rhythms of the day revolved around the business day, and so did chess games.
My parents introduced me to chess when I was about six years old. I got interested in following a daily chess game between my parents over several months. They hung a 3ft by 3 ft magnetic chessboard on the wall above the electric fire in our dining room. Looking back, I realize I wasn't fascinated by winning. I was fascinated by decision-making. Every morning, the board had changed. Someone had made a decision. Pieces had disappeared. The position had evolved while I was asleep. Without realizing it, I began asking the same question that still interests me today: Why do people make the decisions they do under pressure?
I never saw the end of a game because one or both of my parents reset the board when they finished, and I saw the start of most games, which I now know to be primarily either e4 or d4. Then the next game would continue. This went on for about a year!
Later, when I was eight years old, my parents consolidated their business, and we had a little more energy for playing. We would play chess once or twice per month. They bought me a basic chess computer to play with. I enjoyed the computer play, passing the time in play (but not really learning), but I loved the challenge of my father playing over the board with no clock. At first, my father was a gentle teacher until my play became strong enough to match his and then beat him in our best-of-five challenge games. Things could get heated, and in my early twenties, we nearly came to blows, but my mother, realizing the old bull and the young bull could get hurt, intervened, and we found ourselves laughing for many years at how things unfolded.
My first tournament was with my Cub Scout troop, where I won our internal competition. Then I played in a district event. I started strong, got overconfident, got handled, and finished in the middle of the pack after five matches. Looking back, I did not know why I was strong in some areas, weak in others, how I was overmatched, or how to reset between games. Looking back, I wasn't disappointed. I was curious. Why did I play well in some games and poorly in others? Why did confidence disappear so quickly? Why did one loss seem to affect the next game? I didn't have the language then, but those questions eventually became my career.
During the past twenty-five years, I've worked with Olympians, professional athletes, coaches, executives, military personnel, and couples under pressure. Again, I have seen the same pattern. Performance is rarely limited by knowledge. It is limited by the ability to apply knowledge under pressure.
Chess may be the purest expression of that challenge.
That realization became one of the reasons we created Mind Over Moves.
We don't teach openings. We don't teach tactics. We help chess players develop their psychological skills to use what they already know when it matters most!
My own journey has simply come full circle.