The book is a philosophical offering on chess as a metaphor for life as a whole. I attempt to answer the question: what has chess taught me about life?

Through sixty-four vignettes (situations, anecdotes and observations) over eight chapters. The narrative proceeds from psyche to community to world; encompassing cognition, competition, education, culture, technology, politics, aesthetics and beyond. What I learned is, amongst other things:

Concentration is freedom
It is the mattering that matters
Our autopilots need our tender loving care
Escapism is a trap
Algorithms are puppeteers
We need to make peace with our struggle
There is another world, and it is in this world
Happiness is not the most important thing

The ideas are fashioned from the intense experience of dedicating myself to chess as a confused child, building a resilient teenage identity through the game, becoming a Grandmaster at twenty-two, travelling around the world as a professional player, teacher and writer for much of my twenties and early thirties, becoming British champion three times and regularly competing with world-class players, and then doing something that most Grandmasters never do: enduring a painful maturational process of detaching from the game and building a professional and family life outside it.

In a New Yorker essay on the famous Bobby Fischer–Boris match in 1972, the polymath George Steiner muses on the curious quality of ‘trivial depth’ that characterises the game. He describes chess as ‘ultimately insignificant though enormously meaningful’. The same description applies to many activities, and perhaps even life itself, and yet, Steiner notes, ‘we have no logical-philosophical rubric for this strange amalgam’.

As a chess Grandmaster who once lived for the game, and who now lives with the memory of that intensity as a father and a philosopher, I have come to know ‘this strange amalgam’ of meaningful insignificance or insignificant meaningfulness well. I have learned that it is precisely because chess is both something that doesn’t really matter and something that matters enormously that the game is something else too: a gateway to the enigma of life. The book is about the challenge of living well in the context of that enigma.