Chess Game Life Quotes

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are acculated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life!

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.

Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.

If you sit down and think about it sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying 'THIS IS IT!'? ... I mean, why do that if you really don't want them to eat it, eh? I mean, maybe you just want to see how it all turns out. Maybe it's all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you've built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can't be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire.

You may not see every single piece of the puzzle that creates your life -- you may not see every move the grand chess player makes -- but know, He is in complete control of the game board. Sometimes certain pieces are moved or knocked over to make room for new ones. Other times, things happen because of the world we live in. But everything in the end, will always turn out for good. It's a nice promise, isn't it? To know there's a reason for it all?

When they killed him, Mother wouldn't hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all.

Life is a thing to be lived, not spent; to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one's hand by skill to be made the best of.

Like they say, the game is chess, it damn sure ain't checkers. Every move I make is so that I can conquer and destroy.

Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’ ‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities...In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living...never underestimate the big importance of small things.

The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father’s study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

The game gives us a satisfaction that Life denies us. And for the Chess player, the success which crowns his work, the great dispeller of sorrows, is named 'combination'.

It’s loneliness. Even though I’m surrounded by loved ones who care about me and want only the best, it’s possible they try to help only because they feel the same thing—loneliness—and why, in a gesture of solidarity, you’ll find the phrase “I am useful, even if alone” carved in stone. Though the brain says all is well, the soul is lost, confused, doesn’t know why life is being unfair to it. But we still wake up in the morning and take care of our children, our husband, our lover, our boss, our employees, our students, those dozens of people who make an ordinary day come to life. And we often have a smile on our face and a word of encouragement, because no one can explain their loneliness to others, especially when we are always in good company. But this loneliness exists and eats away at the best parts of us because we must use all our energy to appear happy, even though we will never be able to deceive ourselves. But we insist, every morning, on showing only the rose that blooms, and keep the thorny stem that hurts us and makes us bleed hidden within. Even knowing that everyone, at some point, has felt completely and utterly alone, it is humiliating to say, “I’m lonely, I need company. I need to kill this monster that everyone thinks is as imaginary as a fairy-tale dragon, but isn’t.” But it isn’t. I wait for a pure and virtuous knight, in all his glory, to come defeat it and push it into the abyss for good, but that knight never comes. Yet we cannot lose hope. We start doing things we don’t usually do, daring to go beyond what is fair and necessary. The thorns inside us will grow larger and more overwhelming, yet we cannot give up halfway. Everyone is looking to see the final outcome, as though life were a huge game of chess. We pretend it doesn’t matter whether we win or lose, the important thing is to compete. We root for our true feelings to stay opaque and hidden, but then … … instead of looking for companionship, we isolate ourselves even more in order to lick our wounds in silence. Or we go out for dinner or lunch with people who have nothing to do with our lives and spend the whole time talking about things that are of no importance. We even manage to distract ourselves for a while with drink and celebration, but the dragon lives on until the people who are close to us see that something is wrong and begin to blame themselves for not making us happy. They ask what the problem is. We say that everything is fine, but it’s not … Everything is awful. Please, leave me alone, because I have no more tears to cry or heart left to suffer. All I have is insomnia, emptiness, and apathy, and, if you just ask yourselves, you’re feeling the same thing. But they insist that this is just a rough patch or depression because they are afraid to use the real and damning word: loneliness. Meanwhile, we continue to relentlessly pursue the only thing that would make us happy: the knight in shining armor who will slay the dragon, pick the rose, and clip the thorns. Many claim that life is unfair. Others are happy because they believe that this is exactly what we deserve: loneliness, unhappiness. Because we have everything and they don’t. But one day those who are blind begin to see. Those who are sad are comforted. Those who suffer are saved. The knight arrives to rescue us, and life is vindicated once again. Still, you have to lie and cheat, because this time the circumstances are different. Who hasn’t felt the urge to drop everything and go in search of their dream? A dream is always risky, for there is a price to pay. That price is death by stoning in some countries, and in others it could be social ostracism or indifference. But there is always a price to pay. You keep lying and people pretend they still believe, but secretly they are jealous, make comments behind your back, say you’re the very worst, most threatening thing there is. You are not an adulterous man, tolerated and often even admired, but an adulterous woman, one who is ...

At the end of the day, life was not a game of chess. Life was fucking Jenga.

There is more to life than great chess. Okay, great chess is still a part of life, and it can be a very big part, very intense, satisfying, and pleasant to dwell on in the mind's eye: but nonetheless, life contains many things. Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.

The life of a man is like a game of chess, which he plays according to his art.

The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

And from the time I was a kid, I've had this internal monologue roaring through my head, which doesn't stop - unless I'm asleep. I'm sure every person has this; it's just that my monologue is particularly loud. And particularly troublesome. I'm constantly asking myself questions. And the problem with that is that your brain is like a computer: If you ask a question, it's programmed to respond, whether there's an answer or not. I'm constantly weighing everything in my mind and trying to predict how my actions will influence events. Or maybe manipulate events are the more appropriate words. It's like playing a game of chess with your own life. And I hate fucking chess!

Have you ever seen a demonstrable example of equality in your entire life? Can it be glimpsed in any dog show or classroom? In any ping pong game or chess match? Of course not. It is a philosophical abstraction, something nowhere to be found in nature.

As a rule, the more mistakes there are in a game, the more memorable it remains, because you have suffered and worried over each mistake at the board.

Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing. You must make adjustments if you want to survive. Much becomes expendable. You get happiness where you can. You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish.

There are species that can run faster, climb higher, dig deeper, or hit harder, but humans are special because we can run, climb, dig, and hit. The phrase jack of all trades, master of none fits us perfectly. If life on earth were like the Olympic Games, the only event that humans would ever win is the decathlon. (Unless chess became an Olympic sport.)

The decisions we make in our lives—in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising our children, and relationships—easily fit von Neumann’s definition of “real games.” They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception, prominent elements in poker. Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions.

I doubt whether a doctor can answer this question in general terms. For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

His life was forever a chess game played on a roulette wheel. He’d had to take precise, informed, ball-dropping gambles to get where he’d been.

Life is like playing the game of Chess against yourself, to win you must beat the blacks of you.

Sometimes, as in a game of chess, we must strategically regress so that we might progress toward our ultimate objective.

Life is like a game of chess; you just have to play it backwards and work out all the moves you need to make in advance, to get where you need to be.

I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle may only go straight and the bishop obliquely. These things are to be accepted, and with these rule the game must be played: it is foolish to complain of them.

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense? The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise… You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again…Mario thinks hard again. He’s trying to think of how to articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the self the same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death? … And then but so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.

In chess we have the obligation to move; there is no option to skip a turn if you can’t identify a direction that suits you. One of the great challenges of the game is how to make progress when there are no obvious moves, when action is required, not reaction. The great Polish chess master and wit Tartakower half-joking called this the “nothing to do” phase of the game. In reality, it is here that we find what separates pretenders from contenders.

Once the game is over,’ ” he says, “ ‘the king and the pawn go back in the same box.’ ” “In life and death we are equal.

Life is a chess game, Keira. Every single fucking day, you make moves that determine your future.

I think it was a game to both of you, a real life chess game. Every move you made he countered. In order to get his king, you sacrificed your queen, a bold move. One I believe will work. But at what cost?

You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess,’ she said, as if Nora had nothing bigger to think about. ‘And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game. And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.' Mrs. Elm

The rules of chess were very simple: while it was true that the king was the most important piece in the game, he was also the weakest. The queen was the most powerful, and you best not forget that if you wanted to get ahead in life.

Never let anyone trample, talk trash, and feel superior against you because you’re better than those type of people. Just remember that life is like a game of chess, so make sure you play it smart if you want to survive and live a good life.

I prefer to make my annotations 'hot on the heels', as it were, when the fortunes of battle, the worries, hopes and disappointments are still sufficiently fresh in my mind. Much as I would like to, I cannot say this about these few games which will be given below. In fact, if the annotator should begin to use phrases of the type: 'in reply to...I had worked out the following variation...', the reader will rightly say 'Grandmaster, you are showing off', since the 'oldest' of these games is now more than 25 years old, and even the 'newest' more than 20. Therefore, I would ask you not to regard the following 'stylised' annotations too severely.

You may not see every single piece of the puzzle that creates your life — you may not see every move the grand chess player makes — but know, He is in complete control of the game board. Sometimes certain pieces are moved or knocked over to make room for new ones. Other times, things happen because of the world we live in. But everything, in the end, will always turn out for good. It’s a nice promise, isn’t it? To know that there’s a reason for it all? A reason for your cancer — maybe by having cancer you’ve saved the lives of three of your best friends. Had you not been sick, would you have met them? Had you not been sick, would you have found the love of your life? Maybe it’s not in the perfection of life that things make sense, but in the chaos.

...That is my biography from the first day of my chess life to the present. JOURNALIST. And your plans. PLAYER. To play!

Life is a game of Chess...We move with every change...

Sometimes we play Chess in the game of Life..Never sacrifice your QUEEN or KING...

Life is like playing the game of chess against yourself, to win, you must beat the blacks of you.

If u know, Chess is the game that teach u about defense not strike. Enjoy ur tempo and win the game!

Life is like a chess game; you have to think three moves ahead. Sadly, many people jump ahead and then wish that they could make six moves backwards.

it feels like that is the perfect example of real life. Someone out there is holding down my backspace key and the longer he does this, the more I disappear. I try to write my story again but there he is, erasing, deleting. We are all just pieces in life’s game of chess.

Life is not the game of Chess - "Check - Mate, game over", and play again. Life gives you ample time to improve, learn and correct your mistakes and enjoy, THAN "Check - Mate, game over".

Another time, he was playing [chess] with his equal, the Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of the game, he promptly captured it. "Ah," said the duchess, "we do not take Kings so." Replied Franklin in a famous quip: "We do in America.

I’m not forcing you to do anything. You need to make your own damn decisions . And I'm not playing this game where we ignore reality and pretend to have a normal conversation for a few hours. You need to face reality and stop turning life into a movie. I'm not a puppet in your show. This is real life and you're always trying to ignore it for some cheap fantasy version where no problems exist. That's not noble of you, okay? You're not strong. You're a weak person like the rest of us. You've just learned to excel at avoiding issues. But there are issues . Life has so many freaking issues and if you can't force your own self to face life and make decisions without someone telling you what the hell to do, you're just going to end up another chess piece moved around by others.

Life is short, precious, and should not be wasted. Everyone has a chance at it. We’re equals after all. There are no pawns, no kings, and no queens. We’re all humans and we all have the same value.

Checkers is the game of life,” she said. “Idiots will tell you that chess is, but it isn’t. That’s a game of war. Real life is like checkers. You try to make your way to where you need to go and to do it you’ve got to jump over people while they’re trying to jump over you and everyone is in each other’s way.

He keeps it locked in a room guarded by a three-headed dog, which drops into a pit of strangling vines, followed by a life-or-death life-size game of chess, which opens into a room with a locked door and a hundred keys on wings, and then there’s a mirror. . . .

Do I really deserve this? Artyom thought. Is my life so much more important than the lives of all these people? No, he was glad to have been rescued. But all these people – randomly scattered, like bags and rags, on the granite of the platform, side by side, on the rails, left forever in the poses that Hunter’s bullets had found them in – they all died so that he could live? Hunter had made this exchange with such ease, just as though he had sacrificed some minor chess figures to safeguard one of the most important pieces . . . He was just a player, and the metro was a chessboard, and all the figures were his, because he was playing the game with himself. But here was the question: Was Artyom such an important piece to the game that all these people had to perish for his preservation?

But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station–and there is occupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

We are like chess players who are trying to predict the opponent’s future moves, but in this case, we are dealing with life itself. True masters do not play the game on a single chessboard, but on multiple chessboards at the same time. And what’s the difference between grandmasters and masters? Surprises. The moves that cannot be predicted by the opponent. Life can play a simultaneous game with seven billion people at the same time and it can take each and every one of us by surprise. And we still believe we are capable of winning, because we can predict three of four moves ahead. We are insignificant.

There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.

I'm afraid the Le Livre de l'esprit errance is quite impossible to obtain, mon chéri." Mrs. Rochester dropped her eyes. "He keeps it locked in a room guarded by a three-headed dog, which drops into a pit of strangling vines, followed by a life-or-death life-size game of chess, which opens into a room with a locked door and a hundred keys on wings, and then there's a mirror ..." Branwell gasped. "That's horrible! That poor three-headed dog!" "I bet he just keeps it in his desk," Alexander said. "Are you sure that obstacle course of death isn't something else?" Mrs. Rochester tilted her head. "Oh, I think you're right.

Near the gardens, Pei stopped and caught her breath. She liked sweet-voiced Song Lee and hoped for the best in dealing with the other sisters, but Pei rememered all too well the different personalities that had affected her life, first at the girls' house, then at the silk factory and sisters' house. Dealing with so many people was often like playing a game of chess. There were so many pieces, all moving in different directions. It was always wise to guard all sides against capture.

The British are a peculiar race. My grandfather was transported to Malaya because they needed tin, and yet I’ve never once met a Briton to whom the thought had occurred that perhaps I spoke English because I am from one of their colonies. It is as if I were a piece of chess in a game played by people who never look down at their fingers.

God save you from ever being obliged to beat in a game of chess, whose stake is your life, you having but four poor pawns and pieces and your adversary with his full force unshorn. But if you are, provided you have any strength with breadth of will, do not despair. Though mesmeric power may not save you, it may help you; try it at all events.

The masses of people are carried along, obedient to their environment; the wills and desires of others stronger than themselves; the effects of inherited tendencies; the suggestions of those about them; and other outward causes; which tend to move them about on the chess-board of life like mere pawns. By rising above these influencing causes, the advanced Hermetists seek a higher plane of mental action, and by dominating their moods, emotions, impulses and feelings, they create for themselves new characters, qualities and powers, by which they overcome their ordinary environment, and thus become practically players instead of mere Pawns. Such people help to play the game of life understandingly, instead of being moved about this way and that way by stronger influences and powers and wills. They use the Principle of Cause and Effect, instead of being used by it. Of course, even the highest are subject to the Principle as it manifests on the higher planes, but on the lower planes of activity, they are Masters instead of Slaves.

Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.

Life is a Game of Chess Between Me and God; Let the Best Player Win

I’ve always found chess to be a bit too much like real life to provide much enjoyment as a game.

Life isn't always like Chess. But sometimes it is. In a really difficult game, queen leaves board at the end. The difference is, you call it sacrifice in Chess.

Life wasn't meant to be played like a game of chess, moving the people you love like pawns to win the game.

Life is a game of chess, and you're playing checkers

The game of chess is like the game of life. You move, then wait patiently until the other person moves....mgc

I don't know how to play chess, but to me, life is like a game of chess.

At the end of the day, life was not a game of chess. Life was fucking Jenga. You tried winging through it, hoping it wouldn't fall down in spectacular fashion and bury you.

In the business world life is like a chess game, you always have to choose wisely before making your next move.

Life is a chess play. You have to learn the rules of the game to win the scores rights.

Tibet has not yet been infested by the worst disease of modern life, the everlasting rush. No one overworks here. Officials have an easy life. They turn up at the office late in the morning and leave for their homes early in the afternoon. If an official has guests or any other reason for not coming, he just sends a servant to a colleague and asks him to officiate for him. Women know nothing about equal rights and are quite happy as they are. They spend hours making up their faces, restringing their pearl necklaces, choosing new material for dresses, and thinking how to outshine Mrs. So-and-so at the next party. They do not have to bother about housekeeping, which is all done by the servants. But to show that she is mistress the lady of the house always carries a large bunch of keys around with her. In Lhasa every trifling object is locked up and double-locked. Then there is mah-jongg. At one time this game was a universal passion. People were simply fascinated by it and played it day and night, forgetting everything else—official duties, housekeeping, the family. The stakes were often very high and everyone played—even the servants, who sometimes contrived to lose in a few hours what they had taken years to save. Finally the government found it too much of a good thing. They forbade the game, bought up all the mah-jongg sets, and condemned secret offenders to heavy fines and hard labor. And they brought it off! I would never have believed it, but though everyone moaned and hankered to play again, they respected the prohibition. After mah-jongg had been stopped, it became gradually evident how everything else had been neglected during the epidemic. On Saturdays—the day of rest—people now played chess or halma, or occupied themselves harmlessly with word games and puzzles.

Life isn’t chess, a game of perfect information, one that can in theory be “solved.” It’s poker, a game where you’re trying to make the best decisions using the limited information you have.

Rather than reacting to every obstacle or dashed expectation, incorporate the event into your overall plan. Real life setbacks like rejections, broken promises, and unfair disadvantages will happen. Rethink the meaning behind the emotional triggers and how your reaction will further your purpose. Manage emotions by recognizing their place, but do not allow them to control your moves.

Life is all about making choices, as in a game of chess. The moves from other side are predetermined against every move of yours. But with each move, you shift your destiny for better or worse.

(Paragraph 128) Since many people may find paradoxical the notion that a large number of good things can add up to a bad thing, we illustrate with an analogy. Suppose Mr. A is playing chess with Mr. B. Mr. C, a Grand Master, is looking over Mr. A’s shoulder. Mr. A of course wants to win his game, so if Mr. C points out a good move for him to make, he is doing Mr. A a favor. But suppose now that Mr. C tells Mr. A how to make ALL of his moves. In each particular instance he does Mr. A a favor by showing him his best move, but by making ALL of his moves for him he spoils his game, since there is not point in Mr. A’s playing the game at all if someone else makes all his moves. The situation of modern man is analogous to that of Mr. A. The system makes an individual’s life easier for him in innumerable ways, but in doing so it deprives him of control over his own fate.

Sex is no longer a beautiful thing", she said. "It has become an entirely separate entity from what was quaintly known as making love. It's been transformed into a game between the sexes. It is as deceptive as chess and as anonymous as those men in helmets, racing cars on TV. This generation of men and women have turned it into a frenetically overenergetic contest and a performance. The more outlandish the game, the more popular it becomes".

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.

I thought you wanted me to teach you how to play. (Chess) Each possible move represents a different game - a different universe in which you make a better move. By the second move there are 72,084 possible games. By the 3rd - 9 million. By the 4th…. There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe. No one could possibly predict them all, even you. Which means that first move can be terrifying. It’s the furthest point from the end of the game. There’s a virtually infinite sea of possibilities between you and the other side but it also means that if you make a mistake, there’s a nearly infinite amount of ways to fix it so you should simply relax and play.

Physical love only rarely merges with the soul's love. What does the soul actually do when the body unites (in that age-old, universal, immutable motion) with another body? What a wealth of invention it finds in those moments, thus reaffirming its superiority over the monotony of the corporeal life! How it scorns the body, and uses it (together with its partner) as a pretext for insane fantasies a thousand times more carnal than the two coupled bodies! Or conversely: how it belittles the body by leaving it to its pendular to-and-fro while the soul (already wearied by the caprices of the body) turns its thoughts entirely elsewhere: to a game of chess, to recollections of dinner, to a book...

We are navigating through the unconscious, and this brings us to the occult, something hidden, secret and “difficult to understand.” When things bog down, it is time for something else. Therapists need to have a variety of methods and perspectives ready. For example, dysfunctional families create a lot of confusion, havoc and pain. Interlopers, straw men and false gods have usurped the soul's central position — and oftentimes therapists have a chess game on their hands.

Chess contains the concentrated essence of life: First, because to win you have to be supremely patient and farseeing; and second, because the game is built on patterns, whole sequences of moves that have been played before and will be played again,

It is therefore inevitable that we should seek compensation for the loss of life in the world of fiction, in literature, and in the theater. There we still find people who know how to die, who are even quite capable of killing others. There alone the condition for reconciling ourselves to death is fulfilled, namely, if beneath all the vicissitudes of life a permanent life still remains to us. It is really too sad that it may happen in life as in chess, where a false move can force us to lose the game, but with this difference, that we cannot begin a return match. In the realm of fiction we find the many lives in one for which we crave. We die in identification with a certain hero and yet we outlive him and, quite unharmed, are prepared to die again with the next hero.

Just like anything, don't rush a good thing. Enjoy it. Just like in a game of chess, all of the pieces serve a different purpose . In conquering daily battles, we must remember to set our bars a little lower to discover the immediate joys existing right under our our nose.

Sometimes it feels like that is the perfect example of real life. Someone out there is holding down my backspace key and the longer he does this, the more I disappear. I try to write my story again but there he is, erasing, deleting. We are all just pieces in life’s game of chess.

This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory, and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as best move or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence.

In a satirical piece, she parodied the indignities of the job interview: “i am twenty-three [actually twenty-five], just out of college, authority on all books and a great writer, can type, cook, play a rather emotional game of chess, and have a republican father which is no fault of mine.

Chess is 99 per cent tactics. If you don’t pay attention to the tactics, no strategy you devise will fetch you rewards. Strategy can’t compensate for mistakes in execution. If you persist with neat execution, it will keep you in the game even if you’re not able to follow a broader strategy. Strategy without tactics, though, falls at the first hurdle. For me, strategizing for a game isn’t about putting together a specific manoeuvre of pieces. It’s about thinking what my opponent could be aiming for, knowing what my objectives are and then preparing to get what I want out of the game.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

I hope you two had fun up there,” Ruby said later, grinning at us as we descended into the kitchen. “Because Will made paella, and I’m telling you . . . I may eat this and only this for the rest of my life.” “Is Will coming home with us?” Niall asked her from the kitchen. “It was an excruciatingly competitive game of chess we had going,” I said. “Neither of us was willing to give up until it was over.” Will’s smile was sneaky. “I see, chess? Because it sounded like you were hanging pictures.” Niall nodded. “Something was definitely getting nailed up there.” I laugh-coughed down at the floor.

A true believer may worship Jehovah, Allah, or Brahma, the supernatural beings who allegedly created all life; a true believer may slavishly adhere to a dogma designed theoretically to improve life; yet for life itself—its pleasures, wonders, and delights—he or she holds minimal regard. Music, chess, wine, card games, attractive clothing, dancing, meditation, kites, perfume, marijuana, flirting, soccer, cheeseburgers, any expression of beauty, and any recognition of genius or individual excellence: each of those things has been severely condemned and even outlawed by one cadre of true believers or another in modern times.

But on his walks around the city lately – after long arduous chess games in which his brain has played a role he has not entirely understood – it has occurred to him that perhaps the mind and body are after all one, together, a single being. And that he should be humbled not only by his brain, but by his body also, a complex and beautiful system for the sustenance of life itself. When he and Margaret are together, for instance, the intelligence that animates instinctively his gestures, touching, is that not the same intelligence that suggests to him the move that will later trap the knight? It is the same, himself, his own intelligence, his personhood.

Life is a lot like chess," he said. … "All a matter of choices. Every move you face choices, and every choice leads to different variations. It branches and then branches again, and sometimes the variation you pick isn't as good as it looked, isn't sound at all. But you don't know that until your game is over." (Unsound Variations)

Absent a supernatural creator, though, we have to give up on the question “What’s the meaning of life?” This position is nicely expressed by Viktor Frankl: To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.

Is God the Grand Chess Master? Is life a game of strategy that I should wonder what His next move will be? Some call this strategy . . . ‘God's will.' Where does the Devil come into this? I never could figure this game of life out. Am I playing against the Devil or God . . . or both? The deck is stacked. Poor Adam never had a chance. Neither do I.

And are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad’s coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance – but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end? Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try his luck at it, yet within that immutable little square it is able to bring forth a particular species of masters who cannot be compared to anyone else, people with a gift solely designed for chess, geniuses in their specific field who unite vision, patience and technique in just the same proportions as do mathematicians, poets, musicians, but in different stratifications and combinations. In the old days of the enthusiasm for physiognomy, a physician like Gall might perhaps have dissected a chess champion’s brain to find out whether some particular twist or turn in the grey matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump, is more developed in such chess geniuses than in the skulls of other mortals. And how intrigued such a physiognomist would have been by the case of Czentovic, where that specific genius appeared in a setting of absolute intellectual lethargy, like a single vein of gold in a hundredweight of dull stone. In principle, I had always realized that such a unique, brilliant game must create its own matadors, but how difficult and indeed impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active human being whose world is reduced entirely to the narrow one-way traffic between black and white, who seeks the triumphs of his life in the mere movement to and fro, forward and back of thirty-two chessmen, someone to whom a new opening, moving knight rather than pawn, is a great deed, and his little corner of immortality is tucked away in a book about chess – a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!

I had a strong bias in favor of Russian scientists; many can be put to active use as chess coaches (I also got a piano teacher out of the process). In addition, they are extremely helpful in the interview process. When MBAs apply for trading positions, they frequently boast “advanced” chess skills on their résumés. I recall the MBA career counselor at Wharton recommending our advertising chess skills “because it sounds intelligent and strategic.” MBAs, typically, can interpret their superficial knowledge of the rules of the game into “expertise.” We used to verify the accuracy of claims of chess expertise (and the character of the applicant) by pulling a chess set out of a drawer and telling the student, now turning pale: “Yuri will have a word with you.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. . . . To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion, “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game. . . . One should not search for an abstract meaning of life.

No, No, Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.

They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said. What do you mean? Games don’t mean anything. Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me. John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy’s king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop’s ear, and suddenly it’s playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you’re fucked.

[W]hat matters is not the meaning of man’s life in general. To look for the general meaning of man’s life would be comparable to the question put to a chess player: “What is the best move?” There is no move at all, irrespective of the concrete situation of a special game. The same holds for human existence inasmuch as one can search only for the concrete meaning of personal existence, a meaning which changes from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour.

No, no,’ he said. ‘Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.

In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.13 This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory, and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn.

[Kidman] made life a fascinating game of chess. The board was Australia; the pieces were station managers, land, drovers, stockmen, bore contractors, tank-sinkers, water conservers, money, energy, thought, organization, markets, transport, distances, stock routes, water, grass, cattle, sheep, horses and camels. His opponent was drought, now slowly allying itself with erosion. It was a wonderful fight, lasting sixty-five years. Eventually the man won all along the line, though still fighting at the end.

To put the question [of the meaning of life] in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.

it is again: that Hindu belief that all of life is maya, illusion. Once we see life as a game, no more consequential than a game of chess, then the world seems a lot lighter, a lot happier. Personal failure becomes “as small a cause for concern as playing the role of loser in a summer theater performance,” writes Huston Smith in his book The World’s Religions. If it’s all theater, it doesn’t matter which role you play, as long as you realize it’s only a role. Or, as Alan Watts said: “A genuine person is one who knows he is a big act and does it with complete zip.

Mrs Elm provided a commentary. ‘At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.

Sometimes in the evening when love tunes its harp and the crickets celebrate life, I am like a troubadour in search of friends, loved ones, anyone who will share with me a bit of conversation. My loneliness arrives ghost like and pretentious, it seeks my soul, it is ravenous and hurting. I admire my father who always has advice in these matters, but a game of chess won't do, or the frivolity of religion. I want to find a solution, so I write letters, poems, and sometimes I touch solitude on the shoulder and surrender to a great tranquility. I understand I need courage and sometimes, mysteriously, I feel whole.

There are. Storytelling may be the mind’s way of rehearsing for the real world, a cerebral version of the playful activities documented across numerous species which provide a safe means for practicing and refining critical skills. Leading psychologist and all-around man of the mind Steven Pinker describes a particularly lean version of the idea: “Life is like chess, and plots are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits.” Pinker imagines that through story we each build a “mental catalogue” of strategic responses to life’s potential curveballs, which we can then consult in moments of need. From fending off devious tribesmen to wooing potential mates, to organizing collective hunts, to avoiding poisonous plants, to instructing the young, to apportioning meager food supplies, and so on, our forebears faced one obstacle after another as their genes sought a presence in subsequent generations. Immersion in fictional tales grappling with a wide assortment of similar challenges would have had the capacity to refine our forebears’ strategies and responses. Coding the brain to engage with fiction would thus be a clever way to cheaply, safely, and efficiently give the mind a broader base of experience from which to operate.

Well, the same thing happens in the drama and business of this world, where some play emperors, others pontiffs, in short, all the figures that can be presented in a play, but at the end, which is when life is over, death removes all the clothing that differentiated them, and all are equal in the grave.” “That’s a fine comparison,” said Sancho, “though not so new that I haven’t heard it many times before, like the one about chess: as long as the game lasts, each piece has its particular rank and position, but when the game’s over they’re mixed and jumbled and thrown together in a bag, just the way life is tossed into the grave.”1 “Every day, Sancho,” said Don

The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other. The sea is without a wrinkle. There is not a whisper of wind. The hours last forever. You are so bored you sink into a state of apathy close to a coma. Then the sea becomes rough and your emotions are whipped into a frenzy. Yet even these two opposites do not remain distinct. In your boredom there are elements of terror: you break down into tears; you are filled with dread; you scream; you deliberately hurt yourself And in the grip of terror - the worst storm - you yet feel boredom, a deep weariness with it all. Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating it when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious. Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing. You must make adjustments if you want to survive. Much becomes expendable. You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish.

There is profound meaning in the game of chess. The board itself is life and death, painted as such in black and white. The pieces are those that make a life fundamentally healthy. The pawns are attributes we gather with nourishment and significance. The knight is our ability to be mobile and travel in whatever form it takes. The rook or castle is a place we can call home and protect ourselves from the elements. The bishop is that of our community and our belonging. The king is our mortal body; without it, we can no longer play the game. The queen is the spirit of the body - what drives our imagination, urges, a life force. A captured queen removes energy from the game, and the player may become complacent. A crowning reminder of the game is that the spirit can be possessed again through our attributes.

The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour... To put the question [of the meaning of life] in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to the chess champion: "Tell me, master, what is the best move in the world?" There is simply no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment... the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

And what could Billy know of man except of man as a mere sailor? And the old-fashioned sailor, the veritable man before the mast, the sailor from boyhood up, he, though indeed of the same species as a landsman, is in some respects singularly distinct from him. The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head—no intricate games of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it. Yes, as a class, sailors are in character a juvenile race. Even their deviations are marked by juvenility, this more especially holding true with the sailors of Billy’s time. Then too, certain things which apply to all sailors do more pointedly operate here and there upon the junior one. Every sailor, too, is accustomed to obey orders without debating them; his life afloat is externally ruled for him; he is not brought into that promiscuous commerce with mankind where unobstructed free agency on equal terms—equal superficially, at least—soon teaches one that unless upon occasion he exercise a distrust keen in proportion to the fairness of the appearance, some foul turn may be served him. A ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness is so habitual, not with businessmen so much as with men who know their kind in less shallow relations than business, namely, certain men of the world, that they come at last to employ it all but unconsciously; and some of them would very likely feel real surprise at being charged with it as one of their general characteristics. 17

If one reads attentively, Wittgenstein writes as much in one of the rare pas- sages in which he makes use (in English) of the term “to constitute” with respect to the rules of chess: What idea do we have of the king of chess, and what is its relation to the rules of chess? . . . Do these rules follow from the idea? No, the rules are not something contained in the idea and got by analyzing it. They constitute it. . . . The rules constitute the “freedom” of the pieces. (Wittgenstein 5, p. 86) Rules are not separable into something like an idea or a concept of the king (the king is the piece that is moved according to this or that rule): they are immanent to the movements of the king; they express the autoconstitution process of their game. In the autoconstitution of a form of life what is in question is its freedom.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him — if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking — then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’ ‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities. At the beginning of the game there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are 9 million variations after the first 6 moves. And those possibilities keep growing. So it gets very messy. And there is no way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living...never underestimate the big importance of small things.

I remember, back in college, how many possibilities life seemed to hold. Variations. I knew, of course, that I'd only live one of my fantasy lives, but for a few years there, I had them all, all the branches, all the variations. One day I could dream of being a novelist, one day I would be a journalist covering Washington, the next - oh, I don't know, a politician, a teacher, whatever. My dream lives. Full of dream wealth and dream women. All the things I was going to do, all the places I was going to live. They were mutually exclusive, of course, but since I didn't have any of them, in a sense I had them all. Like when you sit down at a chessboard to begin a game, and you don't know what the opening will be. Maybe it will be a Sicilian, or a French, or a Ruy Lopez. They all coexist, all the variations, until you start making the moves. You always dream of winning, no matter what line you choose, but the variations are still … different." … "Once the game begins, the possibilities narrow and narrow and narrow, the other variations fade, and you're left with what you've got - a position half of your own making, and half chance, as embodied by that stranger across the board. Maybe you've got a good game, or maybe you're in trouble, but in any case there's just that one position to work from. The might-have-beens are gone." (Unsound Variations)

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.

You have asked a question: "Are we by chance a lie?" you say. The possibility disturbs you, but it is necessary for you to reconcile yourselves to being part of an unfinished set of events. You might, for example, be the characters in a literary work of the fantastic genre who have suddenly gained autonomous life. On the other hand, we might be a conglomeration of dreams dreamt by various people in different parts of the world. We are somebody else's dream. Why not? Or a lie. Or perhaps we are the materialization, in human terms, of a chess game ending in a stalemate. Or perhaps we are a film, a film that lasts barely an instant. Or the image of others, not ourselves, in a mirror. Perhaps we are the thoughts of a madman. Perhaps one of us is real and others, his hallucination, There is still another possibility. Perhaps we are a printing error that has inadvertently slipped by, that makes an otherwise clear text, confusing. Perhaps it is the transposition of the lines of a text that brings us to life in this prodigious manner. Or perhaps we are a text that being revealed in a mirror takes on a totally different meaning from the one it really has. Perhaps we are a premonition - the image formed in someone's mind long before the events in which we participate in real life take place. Perhaps we are a fortuitous event that has not yet occurred, which is barely gestating in the cracks of time, or a future event that has not yer occurred. We are an incomprehensible sign drawn on a moist windowpane on a rainy afternoon. We are the memory, nearly lost, of a remote event. We are beings and objects invoked by a magician's spell. We are something has been forgotten. We are an accumulation of words, an event told by means of illegible writing, a testimony no one hears. We are part of an entertaining magic show. A bill sent to the wrong address. We are the fleeting, involuntary image that crosses the minds of lovers as they meet, at the instant they lust, at the moment they die. We are a secret thought. . .

you need only believe that everything is a lie. If the world is not real, if everything we see is a simulation or a game, then the fictions we append to it are no different from the ones which come to us through our senses. And it is true: the odds, overwhelmingly, tell us that we exist inside a computer. Any universe that can support technological life probably will, given enough time. Any technological civilisation will develop modelling, and will in a comparatively insignificant span be able to model everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter. That being the case, the simulation will rapidly reach the point where it contains simulated computers with the ability to simulate likewise everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter, and so on and so on in an infinite regress limited only by computing power. That might seem like a hard limit, but processing power still doubles every twelve to eighteen months, and doubling is more extraordinary than people understand. There’s a story that the Emperor of China once lost his throne gambling with a peasant, because he agreed if he lost to pay a single grain of rice on the first square of a chess board and double the amount on each square on the next until he had covered the board. His debt for the final square was eighteen and a half million trillion grains. It is almost impossible to imagine the capabilities of a machine that much more powerful than the ones we have today, but I think we can accept it could hold quite a lot of simulations of our world. The odds, therefore, are negligible that we live in the origin universe, and considerable that we are quite a few steps down the layers of reality. Everything you know, everything you have ever seen or experienced, is probably not what it appears to be. The most alarming notion is that someone – or everyone – you know might be an avatar of someone a level up: they might know that you’re a game piece, that you’re invented and they are real. Perhaps that explains your sense of unfulfilled potential: you truly are incomplete, a semi-autonomous reflection of something vast. And yet, if so, what does that say about those vast ones beyond? Are they just replicating a truth they secretly recognise about themselves? Russian dolls, one inside the other, until the smallest doll embraces the outermost and everything begins again? Who really inhabits whom, and who is in control?

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.

Metaphors matter because they give conceptual shape to life, and we live within the dimensions of those shapes as if they were real. The cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest: ‘Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.’ Life really is ‘a journey’, ‘big’ things really are significant, sophisticated ideas really are ‘deep’. Such conceptual shapes are real because we make them so. It helps to wake up to the fact that we are to some extent free to create new conceptual shapes, indeed that this may offer our only hope for a genuinely new world.

Whenever I’ve felt satiated and sick of chess, my natural response has been to switch off and leave the game alone for a while, but my love for the game has never soured enough for me to walk away.

For poker, unlike quite any other game, mirrors life. It isn’t the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information.

Life is like a chess game, you either checkmate or you get checkmated.

I am a boy mom, but I am raising two very different boys. So what does #lifewithboys mean in my house? Mud. Blood. ER visits and black eyes. “He threw a rock at me!” but also, “Let’s play a math game on the computer!” Holes in the knees of brand-new pants. Dirty cleats and stinky jock-straps. Marathon games of Monopoly, chess, and Sudoku. Reading Harry Potter five times. Yelling “No throwing baseballs in the house!” Science camp by day and soccer practice by night. Messy hair and dirty fingernails. Overdue library books. Tears. Fears. And love. We may have holes in the walls and holes in our pants, but I wouldn’t trade this life. It’s exhaustingly beautiful and never boring. Someday, my youngest child may have a boy just like him, and when he throws a baseball through the living room window, I’ll tell my son that it’s okay. He’s just a little boy.

Everyone in Paraguay has the same fingerprints. There are crimes but people chosen at random are punished for them. Everyone is liable for everything. An extension of the principle, there but for the grace of God go I. Sexual life is very free. There are rules but these are like the rules of chess, intended to complicate and enrich the game. I made love to Jean Mueller while her husband watched. There have been certain technical refinements. The procedures we use (called here “impalement”) are used in Paraguay but also new techniques I had never before encountered, “dimidiation” and “quartering.” These I found very refreshing.

the ultimate power in this future global state resides not with a traditional dictator, but with the human-made bureaucratic system itself. There is no single person who is extraordinarily powerful; rather, all are pawns in a chess game whose draconian rules nobody is able to change or challenge. By engineering a system where people keep one another in check with the surveillance technology, this faceless, leaderless state is able to last for many millennia, keeping Earth free from superintelligence.

We learned that to lie to a machine, you don't need to be a perfect writer: rather, you need only believe that everything is a lie. If the world is not real, if everything we see is a simulation or a game, then the fictions we append to it are no different from the ones which come to us through our senses. And it is true: the odds, overwhelmingly, tell us that we exist inside a computer. Any universe that can support technological life probably will, given enough time. Any technological civilisation will develop modelling, and will in a comparatively insignificant span be able to model everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter. That being the case, the simulation will rapidly reach the point where it contains simulated computers with the ability to simulate likewise everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter, and so on and so on in an infinite regress limited only by computing power. That might seem like a hard limit, but processing power still doubles every twelve to eighteen months, and doubling is more extraordinary than people understand. There’s a story that the Emperor of China once lost his throne gambling with a peasant, because he agreed if he lost to pay a single grain of rice on the first square of a chess board and double the amount on each square on the next until he had covered the board. His debt for the final square was eighteen and a half million trillion grains. It is almost impossible to imagine the capabilities of a machine that much more powerful than the ones we have today, but I think we can accept it could hold quite a lot of simulations of our world. The odds, therefore, are negligible that we live in the origin universe, and considerable that we are quite a few steps down the layers of reality. Everything you know, everything you have ever seen or experienced, is probably not what it appears to be. The most alarming notion is that someone – or everyone – you know might be an avatar of someone a level up: they might know that you’re a game piece, that you’re invented and they are real. Perhaps that explains your sense of unfulfilled potential: you truly are incomplete, a semi-autonomous reflection of something vast. And yet, if so, what does that say about those vast ones beyond? Are they just replicating a truth they secretly recognise about themselves? Russian dolls, one inside the other, until the smallest doll embraces the outermost and everything begins again? Who really inhabits whom, and who is in control? None of this is as it appears.

We learned that to lie to a machine, you don't need to be a perfect liar: rather, you need only believe that everything is a lie. If the world is not real, if everything we see is a simulation or a game, then the fictions we append to it are no different from the ones which come to us through our senses. And it is true: the odds, overwhelmingly, tell us that we exist inside a computer. Any universe that can support technological life probably will, given enough time. Any technological civilisation will develop modelling, and will in a comparatively insignificant span be able to model everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter. That being the case, the simulation will rapidly reach the point where it contains simulated computers with the ability to simulate likewise everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter, and so on and so on in an infinite regress limited only by computing power. That might seem like a hard limit, but processing power still doubles every twelve to eighteen months, and doubling is more extraordinary than people understand. There’s a story that the Emperor of China once lost his throne gambling with a peasant, because he agreed if he lost to pay a single grain of rice on the first square of a chess board and double the amount on each square on the next until he had covered the board. His debt for the final square was eighteen and a half million trillion grains. It is almost impossible to imagine the capabilities of a machine that much more powerful than the ones we have today, but I think we can accept it could hold quite a lot of simulations of our world. The odds, therefore, are negligible that we live in the origin universe, and considerable that we are quite a few steps down the layers of reality. Everything you know, everything you have ever seen or experienced, is probably not what it appears to be. The most alarming notion is that someone – or everyone – you know might be an avatar of someone a level up: they might know that you’re a game piece, that you’re invented and they are real. Perhaps that explains your sense of unfulfilled potential: you truly are incomplete, a semi-autonomous reflection of something vast. And yet, if so, what does that say about those vast ones beyond? Are they just replicating a truth they secretly recognise about themselves? Russian dolls, one inside the other, until the smallest doll embraces the outermost and everything begins again? Who really inhabits whom, and who is in control? None of this is as it appears.

At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’ Eventually,

If I played any of the ordinary openings, such as are found in the books, I was sure to be beaten. The only way in which I had a chance of winning, was by making early in the game a move so bad that it had not been mentioned in any treatise.

Life is like a game of chess. Either be a KING or used as a pawn

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate. —Isaac Asimov Writer

The difference between politicians and us voters . To politicians its all fun and games. Flexing power and chess moves. To us it is our lives and reality. No matter which decision they take. That won’t affect their salary, job, or lifestyle. But every decision they make it affects our lives, jobs, and lifestyle. Until we are all in the same boat and share the same problems with them. They won’t understand our suffering and won’t solve our problems. They will make decisions that doesn’t favor us. They won’t have our best interests at heart.

This man took my father’s hand in friendship, and then he blew Papa’s jaw off, so I couldn’t even identify his face. He stole the last years of my father’s life—our last chess games together, Papa’s last opportunities to hold his grandchildren.

Life is like a game where pawns can become queens, but not everyone knows how to play. Some people stay pawn their whole lives because they never learned to make the right moves.

A moai is an informal group of people with common interests who look out for one another. For many, serving the community becomes part of their ikigai. The moai has its origins in hard times, when farmers would get together to share best practices and help one another cope with meager harvests. Members of a moai make a set monthly contribution to the group. This payment allows them to participate in meetings, dinners, games of go and shogi (Japanese chess), or whatever hobby they have in common.

At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. [...] In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living. (p.195)

But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death.

She needed to realize life was not a game of Chess. It was a game of Battleship, and the last person to sink wins.

Like in the game of chess, you should think several moves ahead. Every move you make should place you in a better position to win in the game of life.

It may take a very long time, but eventually two chess players will exhaust every possible combination of moves, play every possible game. The universe is, in a way, a large and complex game. Eventually everything repeats. Nietzsche’s belief, though, was just that: supposition propped up by ancient myths and fascinating but dubious statistical probabilities. Nietzsche never felt confident enough to publish his notes. Today most physicists dismiss Eternal Recurrence as more fiction than science.

Motivational Gurus often ask people their 5-year goals, 10-year goals or even 20-year goals. Those who can’t answer that are considered aimless. We are given the illusion that we can plan out our entire life with extreme precision. You couldn’t be more wrong. Life is not a game of chess where you can plan all your moves ahead or have a backup move for everything. There are countless forces influencing what happens to you.

We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?

Life is like a game of chess that you have to play even after losing the king.

Life isn't a game of chess after all.A game of chess involves so very many more possibilities.

Life, is a chess game you win or loose, but just keep playing.

Life is a game of chess. Just think wisely before you take a step ahead.

I took some lifelong lessons away from my days of playing chess. The game is very analytical, and you must change your analysis with every single move. I realized that the same lesson applies to life, too--if your course changes a little bit, your strategy must change along with it.

Life is a game of chess played with flesh and blood.

Digging that hole just to see if you are strong enough to climb out of it is a trait we as humans have developed to put meaning and purpose in our lives. But when you get tired of digging and climbing, you realize that life has no purpose. We constantly search for a way to win the 'Game of Life' until we realize it is impossible. Life is a game no one can win. I wish there was a point where someone (God) handed us an award and said 'Good Job, you won. Now move on to the next step'. This is why I believe life is missing purpose, meaning, and a goal. I also believe that is why we as humans get caught up in games, competition, sports, religion, and even war. These are all events that will come to an end with a winner and a loser. They are definite and absolute, they fill that void we have in our lives. Some could argue that life is definite and absolute, and I would agree, however, how do you win? Fun, Love, Money, Power, Prestige? All of these disappear when we die, thus removing all meaning and purpose. So cheer on your favorite team, challenge someone to a game of chess, and pray to God for redemption, but know why you do it. Be real with yourself, because you are scared, seeking purpose, and stuck playing a game you cannot win.

Life is not like the game of chess. There are not only black and white pieces. There are gray figures, solitary knights, and equivocal characters who never get caught.

I have a lot of time to think. To look at the strands of the past weave themselves into the knots of the present, and to imagine how the future might unfold from them. So many possibilities. Like a game of chess. And you, my little pawn, you are the catalyst, walking through the board one small step at a time, towards...what? What sort of endgame will you bring us all, Orphan?

Every man needs a women, when his life in a trouble. just like a game of chess, queen protect the king

In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game of chess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of each piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it successfully. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. But it may be questioned if the comparison is a happy one. Life is not a game in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life is coöperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I suppose business is more often like a game than is life—your gain is often the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal life there is little that suggests a game of any kind.

Natalie’s house, not least because of the seventeen-inch Zenith, inside a pale wood cabinet, the biggest television Miri had ever seen. Her grandmother had a set but it was small with rabbit ears and sometimes the picture was snowy. The furniture in the Osners’ den all matched, the beige sofas and club chairs arranged around a Danish modern coffee table, with its neat stacks of magazines—Life, Look, Scientific American, National Geographic. A cloth bag with a wood handle, holding Mrs. Osner’s latest needlepoint project, sat on one of the chairs. A complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica took up three shelves of the bookcase, along with family photos, including one of Natalie at summer camp, in jodhpurs, atop a sleek black horse, holding her ribbons, and another of her little sister, Fern, perched on a pony. In one corner of the room was a game table with a chess set standing ready, not that she and Natalie knew how to play, but Natalie’s older brother, Steve, did and sometimes he and Dr. Osner would play for hours.

CHESS: THE GAME OF LIFE The game of chess is one of man’s greatest creations.The rules might seem irrational to a novice, but they are actually the result of one thousand years of tinkering and refining.The game, as we know it today, has essentially been unchanged for the last five hundred years. It is perfectly designed to stretch the human mind to its furthest limits, but not beyond. The board is the perfect size, and the moves you can make have just the right amount of variety. Chess offers the alluring possibility of mastering the game through practice and study.

Ready to play a game of chess after we have lunch?” Charlie said to Bernie. “No. I don’t want to play anymore. I’m not good at it. I never win.” “You can’t stop because you’re not good. How else do you expect to become good?” “I want to be perfect, you know?” “I know, Bernie. But that’s not possible if you don’t practice.” “And what if I never get any better?” “At least you never quit trying, right? I mean, it’s something that you want to do. What would it say about you if you quit everything that you’ve ever wanted to do because it was hard?” “So what you’re saying is that even if I’m no good at it, I should keep trying anyway?” “Yes! If it brings you joy and makes you happy, keep doing it. You can’t give up.” “Isn’t that pointless?” Bernie asked Charlie. “It’s pointless for you to do something that makes you happy?

Life is like a game of chess. You move your pieces to achieve an end goal...you can't lose sight of that goal.

I was beginning to understand that the best kinds of freedom involved choosing your constraints wisely, and claiming them as your own.

Maturing into a viable adulthood is partly about discipline, but it is also about luck. Aldous Huxley famously wrote that experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you. That is profoundly correct. Our life experience is not one event after the other but a series of opportunities to grow by making sense of what is meaningful and what isn't. Some do that better than others.

Chess simulates a truth that we tend to suppress, namely that life is hazardous and we are always at risk. The game is fun but is not entirely innocent fun which is why we tend to reach for chess metaphors in tense situations with high stakes. Love for instance, is a tense situation with high stakes. Or at least it can be. Historically various works of art and literature associate chess with courtly love and by extension with love in general. However chess is a metaphor for love not because the players long for each another or want to knock down the pieces and make out on the board - though there is of course a time and place for that. The link between chess and love is much more oblique. The spirit of eros permeates the game in the forms of suffering and passion that characterise unrequited and unconsummated romantic love ... And shared attention of any process of co creation is a rare and profoundly intimate process. In fact the intimacy we feel through shared attention may be an unconscious emotional driver that keeps us coming back to the game. Moreover, chess thinking in some ways entails compassion because it is about cultivating order through chaos through caring about the felt significance of particular pieces and squares and ideas and outcomes … Caring is a fundamental feature of being in the world … Controlling for all other variables, those given a potted plant to look after consistently lived longer than those who were not.

Chess is about the experience of passion, intimacy and caring but not in the way we typically use these terms. The game reveals implicit meanings in the idea of love by offering a shift in perspective and context. The point is that metaphors don’t function merely as comparisons but more as translations, recreations or re-presentations.

What could me more human than a state of permanent doubt when facing the thoughts and actions of our fellow beings? How we make decisions in that state of permanent doubt matters to everybody of course and most situations in our lives feature one hundred and one small decisions that we are barely conscious of making. Decisions are often framed in the context of strategy and leadership as singular moments in matters of destiny, but they are more like repeated challenges and matters of character. Mostly we are not global leaders with a clear personal narrative featuring decisive moments and clear take home messages. Mostly we are strangers to ourselves and each other, hungry for insight, meaning and refuge to get us through the day. I believe chess can and should speak to that more familiar experience of life.

In chess one realises that all education is ultimately self education. This idea is a timely consideration in our data driven world. Chess lends itself to structural information and quantitive analysis in a range of ways. For instance the numerical value of the pieces, databases of millions of games, computerised evaluation functions and the international rating system. However, the value of the experience of playing the game is more qualitative than quantitive. Like any competitive pursuit or sport, chess is an elaborate pretext for the production of stories. The benign conceit of rules and points and tournaments generates a narrative experience in which you are at once co-director, actor and spectator. Chess is education in the literal sense of bringing forth, and it is self education because our stories about a game emerge as we play it, as we try to achieve our goals, just as they do in real life. Chess stories are of our own making and they are often about challenges we overcame or failed to overcome. Every chess player knows the experience of encountering a vexed colleague whose desperate to share their tragic tale in which they were “completely winning!” until they screwed up and lost. And yet we also know tougher characters who recognise that taking resolute responsibility for your mistakes, no matter how painful, is the way to grow as a person and a player. As the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim says: "we grow, we find meaning in life and security in ourselves by having understood and solved personal problems on our own, not by having them explained to us by others”.

Chess can therefore give us valuable forms of meaning in ways that information, explanations and rational analysis cannot. A chess game is rarely meaningful as a given, it is not data. The story only comes to life when we make meaning out of it and then it becomes what some scholars call capta. Chess has shown me that we need the unconventional language of capta every bit of much as we need the present exponential expansion of data. The philosopher of education Matthew Litman puts it as follows, in the context of how children learn to think but the point applies more broadly: “meaning's cannot be dispensed, they cannot be given or handed out to children, meanings must be acquired. They are capta not data. We have to learn how to establish the conditions and opportunities that will enable children with their natural curiosity and appetite for meaning to seize upon the appropriate clues and make sense of things for themselves. Some thing must be done to enable children to acquire meaning for themselves. They will not acquire such meaning merely by learning the contents of adult knowledge - they must be taught to think and in particular to think for themselves”. The point of the capta-data distinction is that the power of chess lies not so much in the moves created by the games but in our relationship to the stories we create through them. A chess game is rarely meaningful as a simple matter of fact, as data. The story only comes to life when we make meaning out of it and then it becomes capta. In the language of perhaps the greatest scholar of narrative thinking, Jerome Bruner, chess subjuntivises reality. It creates a world not only for what is, but for what might be or might have been. That world is not a particularly comfortable place but it is highly stimulating, it is a place says Bruner, that keeps the familiar and the possible cheek by jowl. In light of the power of metaphor, chess’s role as a meta-metaphor and the capacity of chess to illustrate that education is ultimately self education the question of what chess might teach us about life is worthy of some answers.

To ask a question is to invest in attentiveness, to declare a stake in the answer and that is one of the many gifts of chess; you cease to be a passive recipient of information and become an active learner, an intrinsically rewarding experience. Playing chess is about posing questions to the opponent, and answering the questions they pose you. The little questions are always nested inside bigger ones. As you get better at the game you zoom into the most important questions quickly and you can sense that they are the most important questions because they speak to the conceptual ambiguity that holds your attention. Your overall question is, how can I check mate the opponents king? But the recurring questions that help you answer that include; What am I trying to achieve here? What happens if I go there? What do I do now? How will he respond to that? What does that knight want? The anti-philosopher Frederick Nietzsche saw more deeply into questions than most. We only hear those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

The educational value of chess is that it makes asking questions a reflex and the experience of getting better at chess is finding that your questions get richer and more pertinent. A great deal of chess improvement is about cultivating the inclination to move one deeper than you typically would, but that effort is about being concentrated enough to care. The chess lesson for life is often framed as the importance as being one step ahead of your opponent but I think that aim is to challenge ourselves to push beyond our cognitive comfort zone, to enquire of a place where we naturally want to stop thinking, is this it? Is there not perhaps more to be discovered here?

Most of the studies on chess thinking are related to expertise and really they are about perception. they deal with our visual take on positions rather than the thinking as a productive process. Chess ability stems from noticing patterns over time and recognising in related contexts. Patterns are the raw material of the trunking process, they are constellations of pieces that we gradually become to understand as competitively meaningful.

It is a glorious challenge and and the experience is intensely meaningful and rewarding, but happy? Not as such. The deeper point is that children make your life heavier in a way that is experienced by most people as good. Children give your life depth and definition and responsibility.

There are more possible ways to play a game og chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything.

It is even more frustrating if your opponent is able to force a draw.

chess was more than a game. Chess could be a way to live her life. They had played at night, after dinner and homework. Before a crackling fire, Patsy taught Keera to evaluate before reacting to an opponent’s moves. He taught her to strategize, to consider not just her next move, but her opponent’s options and how she would counter each. He told her the best trial lawyers were strong chess players.

You may not see every single piece of the puzzle that creates your life — you may not see every move the grand chess player makes — but know, He is in complete control of the game board. Sometimes certain pieces are moved or knocked over to make room for new ones. Other times, things happen because of the world we live in. But everything, in the end, will always turn out for good. It’s a nice promise, isn’t it? To know that there’s a reason for it all?

Look at life’s challenges as a three dimensional chess game, and not like a roll of the dice on a Ouija board.

Life is a game of chess, where each move requires careful consideration and strategizing. Sometimes, the pieces fall into place, and other times, we are faced with obstacles that seem insurmountable. It is in those moments of adversity that our true character is revealed, and we are forced to make decisions that can ultimately determine the course of our lives.

Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are accumulated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life" - Allan Rufus, The Master's Sacred Knowledge

That’s when I realised it was all a game of chess. A game with too many checkmates for one board, and maybe too many pawns, with an enraged queen aiming to topple a king that fate had already forgiven and probably sent to purgatory.

There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.

What should you take away from this account of chess? It shows the method for thinking about any highly complex games you may face. You should combine the rule of look ahead and reason back with your experience, which guides you in evaluating the intermediate positions reached at the end of your span of forward calculation. Success will come from such synthesis of the science of game theory and the art of playing a specific game, not from either alone.

Life is nothing but one big chess game.” I grin. “Some people are pawns…others are kings.

When playing checkers or chess, he showed exceptional caution, studying each move at length, working out every possible countermove in his head. “I’ll move just as soon as I get it figured out,” he told opponents who tried to rush him. “You don’t think I’m playing to get beaten, do you?”12 To ensure that he won, he submitted to games only where he could dictate the rules.

Bronowski quoted von Neumann’s response: “‘ No, no,’ he said. ‘Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.’” The decisions we make in our lives—in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising our children, and relationships—easily fit von Neumann’s definition of “real games.” They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception, prominent elements in poker. Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions.

Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn’t a great model for decision-making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck. This creates a challenge that doesn’t exist in chess: identifying the relative contributions of the decisions we make versus luck in how things turn out. Poker, in contrast, is a game of incomplete information. It is a game of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty over time. (Not coincidentally, that is close to the definition of game theory.) Valuable information remains hidden. There is also an element of luck in any outcome. You could make the best possible decision at every point and still lose the hand, because you don’t know what new cards will be dealt and revealed. Once the game is finished and you try to learn from the results, separating the quality of your decisions from the influence of luck is difficult.

There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything.

We narrow and limit ourselves, and explore the possibilities thereby revealed. That is what makes the game. But it does not work without the arbitrary rules. You take them on voluntarily, absurdly, as in chess: “I can only move this knight in an L. How ridiculous. But how fun!” Because it is not fun, oddly enough, if you can move any piece anywhere. It is not a game anymore if you can make any old move at all. Accept some limitations, however, and the game begins. Accept them, more broadly speaking, as a necessary part of Being and a desirable part of life. Assume you can transcend them by accepting them. And then you can play the limited game properly.

This battlefield we stand on is built on love, destroyed by it just the same. We’re all just pawns in a life-sized game of chess, like tiny soldiers taking the first bullets on the front lines, and if we’re lucky, one of us will still be standing in the end. There’s no telling who it will be.

To keep your head sharp you must read! You need to keep your head in practice, the same way you need to constantly play chess to improve your game or at least stay good! And the same goes for your body!

The pattern is pretty common in churches, with the white and black squares representing the two conditions of life and death or praise and censure. In early version of the game Chess, the pieces were to represent humanity, would confront each other in the adversities of the game, symbolising life and death…

There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’ Eventually, Nora won the game.

Von Neumann did not care for most card games. They were, he thought, as boring as the people who wasted their lives playing them, trying to coax mastery—impossibly—out of pure chance. Games of pure chance, though, were to his mind not much worse than those at the opposite end: games like chess, where all the information could theoretically be gleaned, where every move could be mathematically accounted for in advance. There was one exception to his distrust of gaming: poker. He loved it. To him, it represented that ineffable balance between skill and chance that governs life—enough skill to make playing worthwhile, enough chance that the challenge was there for the taking.