Mind sport

A competitive activity in which success depends primarily on mental skill rather than physical strength or endurance, as in chess, bridge, or memory competition.

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Chess: A board game in which two players move pieces to checkmate the opponent’s king. It is the best-known example of a mind sport built around strategic calculation.
Working memory: The limited-capacity system that temporarily holds and manipulates information for ongoing tasks. It supports calculation, planning, and keeping game positions or bids in mind.
International Mind Sports Association: An international organization that promotes mind sports and coordinates events across participating games. It helped frame distinct games as members of a shared sporting category.
Physical sport: A competitive activity in which physical exertion or bodily skill is central to performance. The distinction turns on whether mental or physical abilities primarily determine success.
Contract bridge: A partnership card game in which bidding determines a contract and declarer tries to fulfill it. It shows how partnership, bidding, and incomplete information shape a mind sport.
Pattern recognition: The process of identifying meaningful structures in sensory or symbolic information. Experienced competitors recognize useful configurations faster than novices can calculate them from scratch.
World Mind Sports Games: A multi-sport international event featuring competitions such as bridge, chess, draughts, and Go. The event gave the mind-sport idea a visible counterpart to multisport competitions.
Esports: Organized competitive video gaming, often played professionally before live or online audiences. Esports combine strategic thinking with rapid motor skills, complicating a sharp mental-physical divide.
Competitive memory: The trained practice of memorizing information under timed conditions and competing to recall it accurately. It makes memory performance itself the contest rather than a means to another game.
Decision theory: The mathematical study of choices under uncertainty and their consequences. It clarifies how competitors weigh likely outcomes when information is incomplete.