Take a breath and think:
What move to make? How to win?
Hope the air was clean.
Chess demands players think strategically about their next moves, the possible ramifications and the potential responses of their opponents. It’s a high cognitive load with a lack of randomness or hidden information, meaning that players succeed or fail based entirely on their mental performance.
But research by Künn et al. (2019) suggests that whilst players may take steps to ensure an optimal cognitive performance (such as being rested or mental training exercises) the air they breathe can also influence the quality of decisions made.
The researchers found that air quality affected player decisions during several tournaments held in Germany over 3 years. The researchers used a chess engine to evaluate the quality of around 30,000 moves made during 596 games and then compared this with measures of air quality at the tournaments. They found that:
“An increase in the indoor concentration of fine particular matter by 10 µg/m3 increases a player’s probability of making an erroneous move by 26.3%.”
Happily this finding should have little impact in most chess games, where players sitting across from one another will be exposed to the same levels of air pollution.
Original research: http://ftp.iza.org/dp12632.pdf