The chessboard whisperers: Mental coaches in demand after Gukesh's success

With Paddy Upton's client, Gukesh, proving spectacularly successful, chess prodigies from around the world will be in the market for mental coaches

One of the more interesting aspects of Gukesh Dommaraju’s successful campaign for the world championship was the induction of Paddy Upton as part of his team. The South African is a former first-class cricketer and rugby international. He’s also worked as a strength and conditioning coach.

 

But his real credentials are as a mental coach, a head whisperer who’s worked across 20 different sports and esports. Indians may recall Upton as part of the outfit that supported the winning squad in the 2011 cricket World Cup, and as a consultant with the hockey team that won bronze at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Upton has also authored a bestseller, The Barefoot Coach: Life-changing insights from working with the world’s best cricketers, which is now likely to become a cult classic on the chess circuit.

 

Upton is a self-confessed beginner at chess. When he was approached by Gukesh’s sponsor in May, he was hesitant though intrigued. He had never worked at a sport where, as he says, the mind is the main performance tool. But he felt the principles for improving performance in any sport are probably similar.

 

Upton and Gukesh hit it off, spending a few hours each week discussing preparation for and playing high-level chess. The new world champion was gracious enough to mention Upton’s contribution at his press conferences, acknowledging that Upton had helped him to sort out his workout and sleep schedules and prepared him mentally for all the situations he might encounter during the title match.

 

Upton, for his part, uses the analogy of preparing for an exam by reading the books in the syllabus cover to cover. He says Gukesh has studied the whole “book,” working out how to manage his sleep, how to manage downtime, how to manage himself moment to moment during a game. Upton described Gukesh as an exceptionally well-prepared professional who is highly self-aware and more mature than the average 25-year-olds he has worked with.

 

Upton says one of the things talented newcomers in any sport need to learn is that it is necessary to perform to their normal form, rather than jump to a new level and risk losing form when competing in a major event for the first time. This is a wonderful insight — you are in a big event because your normal form was good enough to get there. It may seem odd that chess, the most cerebral of sports, has taken so long to regard mental conditioning as integral to preparation. This is perhaps due to a sense of exceptionalism and, possibly, hubris.

 

Chess has always considered itself different from other sports. While this was possibly true for some years, it has become increasingly less so as the game is now played for substantial sums under stringent tournament conditions and tight time controls. And, as in any sport, the same fears and anxieties prey on players’ nerves and every professional sportsperson has to learn how to deal with those while optimising their skills.

 

Chess players are good at recognising visual patterns and are usually of normal intelligence, or occasionally better. But they tend to assume they are equally smart in other respects, including psyching each other out. This is not necessarily true. It is unlikely a professional chess player, who has spent time focussed on learning the subtleties of sundry openings and tackling difficult endgames, is better at dealing with their own emotional frailties than a psychologist who has focussed on understanding the vagaries of the mind.

 

Mental coaching, motivational training, life training, and the like are soft skills, and it’s difficult to determine their impact. Upton says a good mental coach may add 1-2 per cent to the performance levels of a top sportsperson by helping them understand themselves. That is of course, enough to make a difference when two athletes are stretched to their limits, and it may well have done the trick in Gukesh’s case.

 

But it is hard to measure such small differences objectively, and the internet is choc-a-bloc with “amateurs” and outright charlatans offering such services. It’s very hard to judge which of them actually delivers value. Nevertheless, now that Upton’s client has proved to be spectacularly successful, chess prodigies from around the world will be in the market for such services. This could be a new niche for “head whisperers”.