ChessBase ·
ChessBase Schachtalk: How Much Mental Training Does Chess Need?
A conversation about the role of mental training in chess – with Janik Notheis on ChessBase Schachtalk.
ChessBase is one of the leading brands in world chess: the Hamburg-based company has been developing chess software since the 1980s, runs one of the largest chess databases in existence, and operates news portals (de.chessbase.com / en.chessbase.com) that are a central voice in the international chess scene. When ChessBase picks up a topic, it carries weight – both at the grassroots and the professional level.
The format "Schachtalk am Sonntag" ("Sunday Chess Talk") is an established interview series by ChessBase featuring personalities from chess, science and adjacent fields. In this special edition, the guest is Janik Notheis – co-founder of SportsMind and ChessMind, sport psychology practitioner, and one of the people behind the first explicitly mental training framework for chess.
The conversation revolves around a question that sounds simple but is uncomfortable in practice: how much mental training does chess actually need? Janik Notheis argues that mental work in chess is traditionally underestimated because the game is perceived as a purely cognitive discipline – although studies in sport psychology show that stress, emotion regulation and attention control massively influence cognitive performance.
Other topics include a healthy error culture (why "tilt" after a blunder is often the real defeat), dealing with time pressure, the phenomenon of "mental blackout" in decisive games, and why many players systematically misjudge their own mental state. Along the way, the ChessMind approach is introduced: a modular system that treats these topics not as self-optimisation but as a regular training field.
For ChessBase readers who want to dig deeper, the interview places the state of sport psychology research in a hands-on context and shows how evidence-based methods can be integrated into daily chess training – on your own, in a club, or with a coach. It also serves as a good introduction to the idea behind SportsMind: mental performance as a discipline that transcends individual sports.