We thoroughly enjoyed the article by Leite Franklin et al. titled Neurology, psychiatry, and the chess game: a narrative review
[1].
In his book, Homo Ludens, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga considered the element of play to be as essential
as reflection for all human beings. According to Huizinga, games enhance various qualities:
they create order by having rules and limits in time and space, foster social relationships,
simulate reality, and captivate by generating tension and competitiveness[2]. Undoubtedly, all these characteristics are present in chess, but any activity taken
to the extreme might trigger mental dysfunction when done excessively. As chess aficionados, we would like to enrich the conversation by sharing insight into a forgotten figure
from our national memoirs, who has an enigmatic history of psychiatric disease.
Carlos Torre Repetto (1904-1978) was the greatest chess player in Mexican history
([Figure 1]). He started playing chess at five years old in his hometown in Merida (Yucatan,
Mexico). His family fled the country a few years later to avoid the Mexican Revolution
of 1910. He spent his formative years improving his game in New Orleans and other
chess clubs in the United States.
Figure 1 Mexican chess grandmaster, Carlos Torre Repetto.
At a young age, he participated in the acclaimed Moscow tournament, in which he tied
with champion José Raúl Capablanca and defeated Emmanuel Lasker. He would rise to
become one of the best players of his time, traveling worldwide and eventually becoming
the first Mexican chess player to be awarded the title of International Grandmaster
by the World Chess Federation in 1977[3].
Torre Repetto joins the ranks of a long list of chess players who suffered from mental
health issues. At the young age of 22, he retired from tournaments due to a “nervous
breakdown” probably triggered by stress, burnout, romantic deception, and economic
turmoil[4].
Impoverished, Torre Repetto spent the last years of his life in a nursing home in
Merida. In an interview conducted in 1975, a journalist asked Torre Repetto why he
retired from chess with such a promising future ahead, to which he answered:
“Well, my brother asked me to help him out in his drugstore and told me I could make
some free money. I never spent a cent, but the work in the drugstore challenges the
brain less than chess does. Also, I retired from competition, not from study. To this
day, I still study the game”[5]
.
The chess opening known as the Torre Attack is named in his honor. The Torre Memorial, an annual chess tournament played in Merida since 1987, is still played today.
When asked if chess was science or an art, Torre Repetto responded:
“Chess is science because it has its own standards, its precise mathematical mechanism
whose errors are quite tangible and in which the best paths are progressively discovered,
and the wrong variants are technically checked. But it is also art; there is not a
single path - or a best one - to follow, but each path fits the personality of its
author, and therefore, it is a way of expressing beauty, for which passion and true
inspiration are required.”
