Two people sit facing one another in silence. A few feet apart, each can smell the other and hear every breath. They focus with forbidding intensity on the space that separates them. Sometimes one looks up and searches the other for meaning, mood, an idea. Occasionally their eyes meet until too much is revealed and one glances away. Hours pass. They sweat with strain and the passionate need to overcome. They are pushed to the limit. Bodies are separated by a table, but minds are dancing in a common dream until the bodies fall away and all that is left is thought and emotion and a shared journey through a jungle of complexity. 

	This is a chess game. It is rare that two human beings, short of lovers, share such an intimate focus. As players we learn each other's rhythms. Every mine that you lay, I must uncover and avoid. Every attack I plan, you hinder before it begins. I begin to feel what you are thinking, where you are immersed at every moment. If I see something that gives me a rush of fear, you will feel my reaction and search for the weakness. If there is an easy tactic that you are too deeply into the position to notice, I may sit motionless to avoid a rustle that may snap you back to the surface. If I am sweating you will feed off my fear. If you are excited I will search for the reason. 

	With our minds so attuned to one another, we may see and miss many of the same things. It is quite common for two players to share an obvious blind spot or false evaluation because their concentrations are entangled on the wrong path. We may both think that I am winning because of the emotional evolution of the game, when in fact my attack is unsound and you are clearly better. At such times, the objective evaluation is practically secondary to the emotional reality. If you believe you are much worse, then you may not be cool-headed enough to find the dispassionate refutation. 

	When I was 19 years old I had the honor of spending a mind-opening week working with Grandmaster Victor Kortchnoi at his home in Wohlen, Switzerland. For those who don't know of Kortchnoi, he is one of the living legends in the chess world. A brilliant, feisty, confrontational man who never backs down from his idealism, Victor has charmed and infuriated the chess world for over 60 years. Now well into his 70s, he is still one of the world's top players - but in his prime Victor was a world championship contender and was considered by many to be the greatest endgame aficionado in the history of chess. In our week together, we would spend seven or eight hours every day talking, studying my games, analyzing endgame positions, playing blitz sessions - but beyond all else we discussed his philosophy of chess and I soaked in the wisdom of one of the few living chess sages. Victor dazzled me with his fluid, passionate analysis. When I attacked his position he would become enraged, rise to the board, puff out his chest, and hurl brilliant moves at me like daggers. And then after slamming down pieces for half an hour, like a great sweating saxophonist he would put up his hand and fall into stillness for 6 or 8 minutes - he slowed the beat to silence and I waited breathless to see what was next and then after what felt like an eternity he would slide his hand out with a pawn move that seemed to come out of another dimension. There were moments in our analysis when I felt his 60 years of arduous chess study channeled with mind-numbing intensity into the eruption of a single move - it was then, like never before or since, that I experienced the limitless mystery of chess. 

	That week with Kortchnoi, largely because of his incredible candor, was like having an open window into one of the most exciting minds in the history of chess. Victor told me stories of his immigration from the Soviet Union, of his suffering and years spent away from chess. He told me anecdotes about Tal, Petrosian, and Spassky - former world champions who he knew and battled intimately. One of the more fascinating discussions that Victor and I had was on the psychological connection between chess players. In his years competing in the world championship cycles, Victor played extended matches against all the great ones of his day - and at the forefront of his descriptions was emotion and the paramount importance of being on top of the psychological duel. Victor spoke at length of the tendency "To see what your opponent sees" and of some players' ability to control what the opponent sees - and Victor is very blunt in his descriptions. "Tal was a hypnotist," he told me. At first I thought he was exaggerating, but Victor went on to tell me a story of he and Tal sitting in a European restaurant. The waiter was on the other side of the room, with his back to the grandmasters, pouring somebody water. Tal said "watch this" and looked at the waiter with his penetrating stare which I can attest to being very powerful. The waiter put down the water pitcher, turned around, and ran right over to Tal's side. 

	Now this may seem a little far-out, but if you have ever made a deep study of Tal's games you undoubtedly were awed by both his brilliance and the utter ineptitude with which his opponent's (even strong grandmasters) handled the defense. Many of his most amazing sacrificial assaults were completely unsound - and the student often has the feeling of a blindfold in-between Tal's opponent and the saving continuation. I, for one, found the study of Tal's games to be very frustrating because the defenses seemed so obvious from a perspective outside of the emotional turmoil of the game. Today's top players, like Kasparov, Anand, and Kramnik have much more of an objectivity that runs through their games, but this step in chess evolution might be largely due to the influence of computers on top level preparation and play.

	Kortchnoi speaks of Tal's hypnotic ability without a trace of restraint or doubt. You may be dubious about such possibilities, but Tal and Kortchnoi were not the only top players concerned with issues of this nature. Karpov once hired a hypnotist to sit in the audience during a world championship match with Kasparov. And Kortchnoi told me a fascinating story of Boris Spassky playing an entire match against him from a seat away from the table watching the demo board. Spassky was one of the more charismatic world champions - so such an unusual move was consistent with his boisterous personality. Apparently Spassky did this firstly to unnerve Kortchnoi who was prepared for and used to feeling a presence against whom he was wrestling. Suddenly Victor was out there all alone, and Spassky had months to psychologically prepare for this new competitive situation. Also, Kortchnoi holds that Spassky wanted to personally be more objective and less impassioned by Victor's emotional state. Kortchnoi told me that he was so unnerved that he asked the tournament arbiter to force Spassky to sit down. Of course such a rule could not be enforced and Spassky had gained the upper-hand before a chess move was played.

	Such tactics might seem strange to a beginner, but when you have felt the intensity of extended match play, and vibrated with the tension of two tremendous forces in a month-long stand-off, you will understand the desire to find even the most bizarre ways to gain a slight edge. But methods such as Spassky's tactics and Tal's penetrating ability need not be taken literally when relating them to our own competitive lives. What is crucial is not the particular mechanism, but the reality of an interconnectedness that exists between opponents. And once again, I believe that the best way of handling this reality is to stay present. When you find yourself in the spell of an emotional sway, try to snap back into clarity. If you are in a deep think and can't find an answer, go to the bathroom and splash cold water on your face or refresh your biochemistry by sprinting up a flight of stairs - upon returning you may immediately see the way. I have had many moments in my career when I simply could not find anything and then I got up from the board and had the solution dawn on me when I took a sip of water or just cleared my mind. Sometimes we are attached to the left when we should be looking right. More often we are looking too deep, when the first move of our calculation is the error. Sometimes both players will feel a certain way, and the game will go that way, when all that was needed was a new perspective and the whole character of the struggle would be jolted 180 degrees. Again, if you can snap into the moment and out of the spell of inertia, many cases of chess blindness will be avoided. Here are a few examples from my games in which one or both players were blinded to the obvious.