Abstract
In the sport of chess, where mental skill comes to the fore, players aim to achieve success by predicting both their own and their opponent's moves. In addition, the level of physical fitness is important for chess players to maintain adaptation and endurance throughout the tournament. Apart from these, it is thought that education, emotion control and foresight factor are important components of chess. Therefore, the psychological and physical characteristics of chess players are remarkable. From this point of view, in this study, which was conducted with 26 professional chess players participating in the 2022 Turkey Interuniversity Chess Tournament, it was aimed to examine the psychological and physical characteristics of the players with the help of various structured questions, with the phenomenology pattern, which is one of the qualitative data methods. The data were obtained by recording the answers to the pre-prepared questions during the focus group discussions with the volunteer participants. For data analysis, 3 experts and 1 expert were included and code [Kn] was given to all data. Each of the 6 questions in total was analyzed and interpreted under categories by making thematic content analysis within itself. The results show that chess has both a preventive and supportive relationship with education, and various emotions can be experienced at the same time, just like all sports branches, during competitions.