A grandmaster tournament is a battle between finely trained minds which are capable of carrying out tense mental work for hours. Yet at the same time there is not a single grandmaster, not to mention master or player below that class, who has not made the grossest of blunders in his time. He overlooked an elementary mate in a couple of moves, gave away his queen or rock or what have you. How can this be? How can a trained mind suddenly have a blind spot, how can systematic analysis suddenly be replaced by chaos and confusion? Naturally, as in life itself, everything that happens by chance has some explanation and there is some strange logic in the appearance of blunders. They happen by chance yet do have a reason for them. Our task is to Give the reason in the psychology of the grandmaster’s mind. Once we have found the real reason we can find ways to combat the occurrence of blunders in our own play.

What short circuit in the brain, what overloading, can cause a player to put his queen en prise, or overlook mate? Despite extensive work in other fields of the psychology of chess there has been no real research in this particular field, so our short attempt to deal with this topic in a systematic way may well help the student of the game to reduce the incidence of such unpleasant occurrences in his own play.