In my previous post, I alleged that the chess world abounds with stories of…Well, let’s call them “eccentric personalities.”
I realized that might have been tarring things with an awfully wide brush. I don’t have any concrete evidence that rates of mental illness are higher in the high-level chess playing population than in the general population. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that some elite chess players might be a bit bent. But the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, as the saying goes. I’m not the first person to wonder about a correspondence, so perhaps somebody really has found a correlation.
In the meantime, I dug up some anecdotes about great chess players of the past.