It's Your Move
Garry Kasparov's new book offers life lessons from chess.
BY CHRISTOPHER F. CHABRIS
Thursday, October 25, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Garry Kasparov was the world chess champion from 1985 to 2000, and even after he lost the title he retained his No. 1 ranking on every rating list until his abrupt retirement in early 2005. Since leaving the world of competitive chess he has produced six books on world chess champions and other great players of the past, with more volumes promised. But he has suspended that series for the moment to write what might be best described as a self-help memoir. "How Life Imitates Chess" draws on his own experiences--on and off the chessboard--for lessons on how to succeed in business and in life. Mr. Kasparov himself, it should be said, will need every advantage he can gain from his own advice, since he has recently been nominated for the presidency of Russia by a coalition of disparate opposition parties that he played a large part in unifying. In the election, he will face powerful adversaries who may stop at nothing to thwart him.
"How Life Imitates Chess" is not the first book to compare the game of 64 squares and 32 pieces to the whole of human experience. Mr. Kasparov's rival and predecessor as world champion, Anatoly Karpov, titled his autobiography "Chess Is My Life"--as did Karpov's frequent challenger Viktor Korchnoi. Bobby Fischer, the great American champion, generalized the proposition to "chess is life," and at least in his own case this was true: Over the board he was a genius in full command of events; away from it he became the victim of vicious, paranoid delusions.
Perhaps it is not surprising that world chess champions (and near champions) become so absorbed in the game that it consumes their lives. But Mr. Kasparov's essay on this theme is more audacious than those of his predecessors. He proposes not that chess was his life (though it was), or that chess is like life (all games are, to some extent), but that life is so much like chess that deep insights can be found by comparing the two. In "How Life Imitates Chess" he does just that, recalling some of his games and explaining the most general principles of good chess play, followed by analogies to real-world situations.
Thus leaving a good job to get more education is compared to sacrificing a piece for a better position in a chess game; holding illiquid assets is akin to having more pieces than your opponent, a long-term advantage; and Jack Welch's early strategy for GE was the business equivalent of the chess dictum to focus on improving the position of one's worst pieces. There could be something to these parallels, although one has to wonder whether even chess players think about chess strategies when solving life's problems. What chess can certainly do for life is to train the mind in careful, systematic thinking--and perhaps even to help the mind know when it needs to abandon the path of pure logic.
In a section called "developing the habit of imagination," Mr. Kasparov describes a game against Alexei Shirov in which, rather than retreat his attacked queen, Mr. Kasparov "fantasized" about just continuing his offensive plans without it. After much thought, he sacrificed his queen to increase the activity of his pieces. Shirov could not withstand the added pressure and blundered into a loss. Here Mr. Kasparov draws an unusual lesson from chess: Imagination is valuable, and it is a habit that can be developed. Chess fans, it must be said, may want to hear more about this particular game than this brief anecdote, and readers unfamiliar with chess may not grasp just how difficult Mr. Kasparov's move actually was--and thus why it required a special leap of imagination.
Throughout "How Life Imitates Chess," Mr. Kasparov finds the broader aspects of chess thinking that do indeed apply beyond the game itself. He notes, for instance, that talent and hard work are not necessarily opposing explanations for chess success: The ability to work hard may itself be a talent. He notes the importance of pattern recognition to chess skill and points out how much decision-making happens outside our conscious awareness. And he takes one of the great lessons of the Soviet school of chess--the need to make an analysis of one's own decisions and expose it to outside scrutiny--and urges it as a method for improving unconscious mental processes. His insights are surprisingly thought-provoking and surely possess more value than the bromides of so many business books. "Why did I move my bishop?" may be a question with more lessons for success than "Who moved my cheese?"
In the course of this lesson-giving, Mr. Kasparov touches on many of the most famous moments of his career, including his series of matches against Karpov from 1984 to 1990 and his battles with the Deep Blue chess computer in the 1990s. Concerning Deep Blue, he has barely moderated his stance since he accused IBM of cheating--during the match--by allowing human grandmasters to intervene in the machine's thinking. He still does not understand that it was entirely possible for Deep Blue to make subtle and beautiful moves and still leave Mr. Kasparov an escape--an escape, in the event, that Mr. Kasparov failed to see. He admits to being a sore loser but still hints at an Enron-like conspiracy by IBM to pump up its stock price by rigging a chess match.
As a chess player, Mr. Kasparov was more than just a world champion. "How Life Imitates Chess" provides more evidence that he was, and still is, a great chess intellectual. His career arc resembles that of Reuben Fine, an American grandmaster and brilliant chess writer who in 1948 turned down an invitation to play for the world championship in order to devote himself full-time to the practice of psychoanalysis. As Gilbert Cant wrote in Time magazine many years later, this was a loss for chess and at best a draw for psychology. Mr. Kasparov has achieved more in chess than Reuben Fine, and he has greater ambitions outside chess. If life truly does imitate chess and Mr. Kasparov somehow overcomes the Russian establishment to reach the summit of his new profession, his latest move may have been a winning one for himself, his countrymen and the rest of the world.
Mr. Chabris, a psychology professor at Union College, holds the National Master title in chess. You can buy "How Life Imitates Chess" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
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