What If Your Biggest Chess Problem Has Nothing to Do With Chess?

You’ve reviewed your games. You’ve drilled tactics. You’ve memorized your opening lines through move 15. And yet, you’re still making mistakes that you know you shouldn’t make.

Here’s a thought: what if your biggest leak isn’t on the board at all?

I’ve been coaching and playing chess for years, and one pattern keeps showing up. Players spend months grinding tactics trainers and studying endgame theory while completely ignoring the reason they blundered in the first place. It wasn’t that they didn’t know the pattern. It’s that they were tilted from the previous game. Or exhausted from a bad night’s sleep. Or so anxious about their rating that they couldn’t think straight.

These are what I call “out-of-game issues”: the psychological, physical, and environmental factors that determine whether you can actually access your chess knowledge when it matters.

That’s actually good news. If out-of-game issues are your problem, you don’t need another tactics course yet. It might be that you need to fix problems that are often simpler and faster to address than grinding another 300 rating points worth of chess knowledge.

A Different Kind of Mistake

Last week I introduced a framework for identifying and categorizing in-game mistakes: https://chesschatter.substack.com/p/chess-thinking-process
This includes four questions you should ask every move, and the two-layer system for diagnosing exactly where your thinking process broke down. That framework is powerful for understanding what went wrong on the board.

In the comments to that article, a good question was asked:
https://images.chesscomfiles.com/uploads/v1/images_users/tiny_mce/MattyDPerrine/php0qr7bke09vu47YiVnnD.jpg
Sometimes the mistake (such as time management) doesn’t fit cleanly into the categories I mentioned in the previous article. It might be that the player knew the right questions to ask. They had the tactical pattern in their repertoire. They understood the strategic concept. And they still blundered.

Why? Because they weren’t in a state where they could execute their thinking process properly.

Think of it this way: the four-question framework is your chess thinking process. Out-of-game issues determine whether you have access to that process on any given day.

Surprisingly little chess content addresses this. One notable exception is GM Jonathan Rowson’s Seven Deadly Chess Sins, which remains one of my personal favorite chess books. Rowson digs into perfectionism, egoism, and other psychological traps that sabotage players from the inside. If you want to go deeper on these types of issues, that book is an excellent place to start.

What Counts as an Out-of-Game Issue?

Out-of-game issues are everything that affects your performance that isn’t chess knowledge, strategy, or calculation skill. The key distinction: these issues don’t mean you lack chess understanding. They mean you can’t access the understanding you already have.

They fall into three broad categories:

Physical and Environmental. Playing tired. Playing hungry. Playing at 2am when you have work the next morning. Playing when you don’t have enough time to finish the game properly.

Emotional and Psychological. Tilt after a bad loss. Rating anxiety that makes every game feel like a test. Fear of losing to lower-rated players. Playing to prove something instead of playing to improve.

Mindset and Expectations. Perfectionism that makes any inaccuracy feel catastrophic. Fixed beliefs about your potential. Comparing yourself constantly to friends or peers. Attachment to specific rating goals that creates pressure instead of motivation.

The common thread: none of these have anything to do with whether you know how to play chess. They all affect whether you can play like yourself on any given day.

Is This Actually Your Main Limiting Factor?

Here’s a simple diagnostic. After your next ten games, categorize each loss honestly:

• Was I in good physical condition? Rested, fed, healthy?
• Was I emotionally neutral or positive? Not tilted, anxious, or frustrated?
• Was I free from external pressure? Enough time, no distractions?
• Did I care more about playing good moves than about the result?

Tools like Chessalyz.ai can help you analyze your games and identify in-game mistake. But here’s the thing: if you review a game and the mistakes seem uncharacteristic, if you find yourself thinking “I know better than that,” then the analysis tool has done its job. It’s shown you the errors. But it can’t tell you what out-of-game factors might have contributed to why you made them (yet!). That’s where out-of-game diagnosis comes in.
If more than two of your ten losses trace back primarily to one of these factors being off, out-of-game issues deserve serious attention. If it’s five or more, they’re likely your primary limiting factor.

The Most Common Out-of-Game Issues (And Why They’re Fixable)

The good news is that out-of-game issues can be trained and improved.

Tilt and Emotional Reactivity

You lose a game, especially one you feel you should have won, and your next game suffers. You play faster than normal. You take unnecessary risks. You miss obvious threats because part of your brain is still replaying that previous blunder.

This is fixable. Emotional regulation is a trainable skill. The first step is simply recognizing when you’re tilted and having the discipline to stop playing until you’ve reset. That alone will save you dozens of rating points.

Rating Anxiety

Rating anxiety shows up when you care more about the number next to your name than the quality of play. You avoid playing games to “protect” your rating. Every loss feels like a permanent judgment on your ability.

This is also fixable. Rating anxiety is a relationship with a metric, and relationships can be renegotiated. The rating will take care of itself if you focus on playing good chess.

Time Management

Some players rush even with plenty of time on the clock. Others spend too long on non-critical decisions and then have to scramble when it actually matters.
This one hits close to home. I’ve written extensively about my own struggles with time trouble here: https://chesschatter.substack.com/p/chess-time-trouble-fix
It’s been one of the most persistent issues in my chess career. I’ve lost more games to the clock than I’d like to admit, including a painful loss at the Midwest Class Championship where I flagged in a better position on move 40.

What I’ve learned is that time trouble isn’t really a technical issue. It’s an emotional one. For me, it stems from perfectionism and fear: fear of being wrong, fear of not being able to recover from a mistake. Clock discipline is a habit that can be trained through interval timers, “shot clock” training games, and timed calculation drills. If time trouble is your issue, know that you’re not alone.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism sounds like a good thing, but in chess it’s often a poisoned pawn. If you expect flawless play from yourself, every inaccuracy becomes demoralizing. You carry frustration from one game into the next.

The fix isn’t lowering your standards but instead, it’s redirecting your intensity. Focus on the quality of your decision-making process, not on whether every decision was perfect.

Fixed Mindset Beliefs

“I’m just not talented enough.” “I’m too old to improve.” “I’ll never be good at calculation.”

These beliefs feel true but they’re not. Chess improvement is possible at any age with deliberate practice. The belief that you can’t improve becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it stops you from putting in the work.

You Don’t Have to Choose

You don’t need to achieve psychological perfection before playing chess. The goal is a stable enough foundation that out-of-game issues aren’t actively sabotaging you.

Phase One: Establish Minimum Standards

Create simple non-negotiables:

• Don’t play when tilted. If your last game frustrated you, take at least a 30-minute break.
• Don’t play when sleep-deprived.
• Don’t play when time-crunched by external factors.

Add a brief pre-game routine. Even 60 seconds of settling yourself and setting an intention makes a difference: “I’m here to play good chess and learn, not to gain rating.”

Phase Two: Build Skills in Parallel

Work on chess knowledge AND out-of-game issues simultaneously. Each supports the other. Playing better chess reduces anxiety naturally. Better emotional regulation lets you apply your chess knowledge more consistently.

Phase Three: Address Chronic Issues Over Time

After a month or two, patterns will emerge. Maybe you notice you get anxious near rating milestones, or you tilt whenever you face the Sicilian. Now dedicate specific work to those patterns.

Practical First Steps

The Awareness Experiment

After every game for the next seven days, spend 30 seconds rating your out-of-game state on a scale of 1-10. Physical state, emotional state, environmental state, mindset. Just notice.

After a week, look at the correlation. Did your worst games correspond to your lowest out-of-game ratings? For most players, the answer is obviously yes. That’s your evidence.

One Non-Negotiable

Choose the single out-of-game issue that affects you most. Create one simple rule to address it. Follow it for a month. See what happens.

The Untapped Resource

Here’s the truth most chess players miss: you likely already have more chess knowledge than you’re consistently able to use.

Think about your best games. The ones where everything clicked. That player is you. That’s your actual level when out-of-game issues aren’t dragging you down.
Fixing out-of-game issues doesn’t add new knowledge. It unlocks access to what you already know. That’s why this path can be faster than grinding more tactics. You’re not building something new. You’re removing obstacles to something that already exists.

Your chess knowledge is waiting for you to be in a mental state where you can actually use it.

What out-of-game issue affects your chess the most? Drop a comment below. I’d love to hear what patterns you’ve noticed in your own games.

If you're interested in more articles like this, check out my Substack "Chess Chatter" here: https://chesschatter.substack.com/