"Once you're a chess player, you spend a lot of time thinking about the game and you can't get it completely out of your head"

Chess seeps into thought until it becomes a second language. After enough hours, the mind starts encoding daily scenes as positions: trade-offs become exchanges, detours feel like gambits, and hard choices are weighed like endgames with scarce time on the clock. Calculation and intuition continue to hum in the background even when the board is closed, as though the brain keeps shuffling candidate moves for life itself. The game’s geometry becomes a lens; patterns learned through thousands of positions reappear in traffic, negotiations, and conversation. You begin to feel tempo, when to hurry, when to wait, outside the 64 squares.

There’s a cognitive reason for the persistence. Chess expertise relies on immense pattern memory and rapid chunking; the mind stores typical structures and calls them up automatically. Unfinished lines of analysis also create a mental itch, a Zeigarnik-like pull to return and resolve. Preparation never feels complete: new ideas in openings, novel endgame resources, the lingering question of whether yesterday’s insight holds up today. The engine era heightens this: evaluations change with every update, demanding vigilance. Even rest becomes porous; positions revisit you in the shower, on a walk, or right before sleep. The board is portable, living rent-free in working memory.

The compulsion is double-edged. It fuels creativity, resilience, and an almost meditative absorption, flow that blurs hours and sharpens focus. It also exacts a tax: a low hum of restlessness, the difficulty of switching off, the risk of measuring everything by advantage and accuracy. Yet the inability to get the game completely out of one’s head signals something deeper than obsession. It marks identity. Chess stops being an activity and becomes a mode of perception, an internal metronome for attention and judgment. The challenge is not to banish it, but to harmonize it, letting the game’s relentless clarity refine life without shrinking it to the size of the board.