Human performance at chess has been central to information processing approaches to cognitive expertise in psychology, but psychologists have otherwise paid little attention to human chess players. Whilst science and technology studies scholars have argued that positioning chess as the  “drosophola fly” problem for AI capitalized on and obscured modern literate human chess cultures. I extend this critique to experimental psychology here by historicizing the work of chess player and experimental psychologist Adrianus Dingeman Adrian) de Groot (1914-2006)  was selectively remembered by the influential work of William Chase and Herb Simon (1973), and by a reading of de Groot’s 1946 book Thought and Choice in Chess. My argument is that de Groot’s early work was not only a vital step towards Simon’s cognitive science, but that its understanding of thinking as grounded in experience, personality and culture  renders it  an ironic resource for a more pluralist social psychology of chess that does not assume that human meaning making is primary, or exclusively, information processing.