7 Things I’ve Learned About Life From Playing

The game of chess is one of man’s great creations. The rules can seem arbitrary to a beginner, but are actually the product of over 1000 years of tinkering and refining. The modern game—essentially unchanged now for about 500 years—is perfectly designed to stretch the human mind to its outermost limits, but not beyond. The board is just the right size, and the moves of the pieces have just the right amount of variety, to offer the tantalizing but never attainable possibility of mastering the game with enough time and study.

Moreover, chess is a mirror of life, rich in metaphors for human experience. It is a pitched battle to the finish between opposing armies, yet completely non-violent, with no injuries ever reported from playing. It is a testing ground where we can experiment and act out personal dramas with no consequences other than wiping the board clean and starting over. A blend of primitive instinct and sophisticated calculation, it lets a player directly engage the mind of another human being—learning from experience, memorizing common patterns, methodically building a position, setting traps, analyzing variations, and finally moving in for the kill. And it is a canvas whereupon great players create masterpieces, like famous paintings, that can be enjoyed by generations to come.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about life by playing chess.

1. Women are powerful, men are essential.

The is the most powerful piece on the board, the by contrast is plodding and slow. Yet the game can continue for dozens of moves after the queens are off the board—but once the king dies, the game ends. As in real life, women are often the centers of attention with their dazzle and flash and drama, but in the end, it is individual male leadership that decides the outcome.

2. The threat is stronger than the execution.

This is a common saying among chess players. The idea is that by threatening an action, you can nudge your opponent in a certain direction, but actually carrying out the threat may cause as many problems for you as for your opponent. The parallels with human relationships are evident.

3. Chess is 99% tactics.

Another favorite maxim. While carrying out long-term plans, you have to constantly be on the alert for immediate dangers or opportunities that can radically change the game. You may become a master player, build a strong career, and have a solid physique, but if a moment’s inattention causes you to swerve into the oncoming lane on the way home, it may be all for naught.

4. Different phases of the game require different skills.

It took me a long time to realize that chess is really three separate games—with common tactical themes and goals, to be sure, but requiring very different skill sets overall. The opening requires a lot of experience with common strategic and tactical themes, and yes, quite a bit of memorization. The middle game involves imagination and creative risk-taking. And the endgame demands exactitude and mathematical calculation.

Personally, I’ve always had the hardest time with openings—both in chess and in approaching women. The game is literally wide open at this point and can go in a myriad of different directions, so you have to make strong, general moves that cover a wide variety of situations. At the same time, you need to study a lot of previous games—both your own and those of others—to be prepared for different responses.

5. Latent talent in ordinary people can become obvious after years of hard work.

Pawn can be seen as a metaphor for the way in which ordinary people sometimes have unusual talents that only become apparent to others after years of diligent effort.

6. The best defense is a good offense.

A cliché in sports, this principle applies equally in chess. Even if all you want is a , playing passively is seldom effective against a strong opponent. You must actively work to keep the other player off-balance and create “counterplay” to distract him from his attacking plans.

7. A weakness is not a weakness unless it can be attacked.

Another way of saying, perhaps, that your limitations are self-imposed, and that something you perceive as a weakness on your part may be completely irrelevant in a given context. Thus, fixing your inner game—eliminating psychological insecurities—may be more important than addressing the weakness itself.

I could go on and on about chess. I could talk about the theories of force, space, and ; the way structure gives shape to a position; the different styles of play; the cautions against resting on one’s laurels (“It is not enough to be a good player—one must also play well”); and the social connections you can make and the influence you can acquire by playing. Suffice it to say now, I believe chess should be a part of any serious man’s education. So who’s up for a game?

1. In chess, every move has a purpose. Life obviously cannot be lived with this much unceasing calculation, nor should we want to live it that way, but there are times when we must align our actions with a predetermined strategy, instead of bumbling through it.

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2. Play for the advantage. If you already have it, maintain it. If you don’t have it, seize it.

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3. Everyone’s playing. Sometimes it’s a friendly, often it is more serious. The problem is that not everyone knows they’re playing – even after they have made a move. ***

4. Seize the . If you wait around for someone else to make a decision for you, they will… and you probably won’t like how it turns out.

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5. Learn to spot patterns. There are often clearly defined lines of success that work well. Learn to see these when they repeat, and take advantage of them.

6. Don’t get stuck on the formula. A little bit of creativity and lateral thinking can often take you to new heights.

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7. Ignore what your opponent is trying to do at your own peril. We often get so absorbed in our own games and machinations that we ignore what is going on around us. Be aware of threats and alert to opportunities. 8. Simplify.

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9. If you only play patzers, you never really improve – take on a few tough challenges, and even if you lose, try to learn something new.

10. Cut your losses. Sometimes you are going to lose material. Try to minimise your losses and move on. 11. Play the board, not the player. Don’t target your responses at people, target what they say and do. There is a difference.

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12. Sometimes you get stuck in a position known in chess as : where whichever move you make is a bad one. This is just the way it goes sometimes, in chess and in life.

13. There is nothing more satisfying than a : Pretending to do one thing, while attacking somewhere else. Learn to play and live less obviously and on more levels. This makes you less predictable and more interesting.

*** 14. Be prepared to material for position. Sometimes even the greatest material sacrifice can result in a winning position later on.

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15. If you spend all of your time chasing lowly pawns, you may be on the receiving end of an opponent who cares less about small victories and more about winning the war.

16. A threat is best met with a move that improves your own position. Don’t get trapped into mindlessly trading moves and material in anger. Sometimes the solution is more gentle and cerebral.

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17. You don’t have to be a devious swindler to win… you just have to be better.

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18. We all from time to time. This does not mean we should give up and run away. Often when you’re sure there is no way out after a bad mistake, you will be given a lifeline. 19. When someone makes a move that you cannot understand, don’t read more into it than you need to. Sometimes people just make silly moves – that’s all there is to it. 20. Have a Plan B. And a Plan C. If none of those work, you’re probably doomed.

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21. Play for the middle. Don’t hold back too much, and don’t push through too early. Your opportunity will come.

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22. How you start a game determines how you will finish it. Play wisely.

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23. If an opening appears, seize it immediately.

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24. Don’t get pinned down. Where something more cherished cannot be brought into play because it is stuck behind something trivial, make every effort to get it into the game – as soon as possible. 25. In the end game, attack the King by focussing your attention on his escape squares: When you are in the final stretch, and about to win, anticipate what could go wrong and plan accordingly.

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26. Be flexible. It seldom goes the way you planned – adjust and continue. 27. If you are feeling boxed-in, free things up.

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28. Where possible, trade inferior material and positions for better ones.

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29. The little guys on your side matter. Look after them. 30. Accumulate small advantages.

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31. There are no foregone conclusions in life or in chess. 32. Ignore meaningless threats. Anticipate and deal with dangerous ones swiftly.

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33. Never rest on your laurels. Keep thinking, looking for new opportunities and trying to generate new ideas. 34. Don’t be overly impressed with lofty words or titles. The only thing worse than being overly diffident towards those who outrank you, is being dismissive of those inferior to you.

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35. Keep calm and move slowly.

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36. Replace wishful thinking with action.

37. If you lose, do so graciously and try to learn at least one important lesson. 38. Sometimes a draw is as good as a win. But a draw is always better than a loss.

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39. Keep your options open and always have an escape route.

40. Surprise and impress people with unconventional moves. But not with dumb ones. Creativity always has a purpose – doing something wild and crazy just for the sake of it may be fun at the time, but ultimately has no value. Break the rules – but only if it serves a good purpose. ***

41. Appraise your position honestly. If it is bad, do something about it – if it is good, make it even better.

42. Don’t get swept up by distractions.

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43. Narrow down your choices. And then decide. Take your time, but settle on one plan of action… and then do it!

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44. Sometimes you have to sacrifice in order to achieve a break-through.

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45. Always consider the whole board when deciding on a move: decisions made with too narrow a focus are often bad. 46. Connect your pieces cleverly. Collaboration and cooperation are the keys to success.

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47. Look beyond the obvious. 48. Enjoy yourself.

49. Deep and meaningful is always better than superficially pretty. 50. If all else fails… fake it.

6 Strategy Lessons From A Former Chess Prodigy Who's Now A CEO

While everyone compares business to chess, only a few people can teach the game's most profound lessons. Here, Justin Moore, CEO of the cloud company Axcient, does just that.

By David Zax

Justin Moore is the CEO of Axcient, a rapidly growing cloud services provider. Moore, now 31, is also a former star of the youth chess circuit. At 10, he found a chess book in his mother’s cabinet; by his teenage years, he was one of the 20 top-ranked youth chess players in the . With the seriousness of an athlete, Moore played chess for several hours every day for half a decade.

Moore doesn’t play much competitively anymore; by his college years, he was "probably a bit burnt out," he confesses. Even so, the kinds of thinking that his days as a chess prodigy taught him has deeply informed the way he runs a successful startup. In a sense, Moore does still play chess every day—by running Axcient.

Too many startups, says Moore, behave in a way that’s "reactionary to the market, to competitors, to the newest shiny object."

We caught up with Moore to extract a few lessons about how to apply the mindset to the world of business. Seeing All Possible Futures

Of course, it’s a business commonplace to recommend forethought. But in chess, the metaphor is literalized. "You’re constantly looking two, three, four moves ahead," explains Moore. "If you do this move, what’s the countermove? What are all the countermoves? And then for all of those, what are all of my potential countermoves? Chess is constantly teaching you to think about what comes next, and what comes after that, and what the repercussions could be."

In a chess game, your mind is constantly running permutations of decision trees. In business, your mind should be doing the same.

Eyes On The Endgame

A chess match is a war of attrition. If a soccer match is egregiously lopsided at halftime, the game still progresses, but if White accidentally loses his queen a few moves in, it’s likely he’ll resign. This means that a properly matched chess game is often fought out to a point where only a few pawns, pieces, and the opposing kings remain—a bare-board state known as endgame. In a real sense, the entirety of a chess game is all a prelude to endgame.

"Chess is about getting to endgame," says Moore. "What happens between the start and then doesn’t necessarily matter. You could lose more pieces or a more valuable piece, and at the end of the day, if you capture the opponent’s king, you win the game."

So, too, in many sectors of business, in which many competitors vie for one or a few dominant, winner-takes-most slots (pending SEC approval)."You’re looking out a year, two years, three years," says Moore. "Sometimes that means in the short term you make sacrifices." You might make a tactical decision that appears to put you behind, but actually strengthens your position for when the smoke clears, and each side’s knights and bishops have fallen. Relentless Focus

It's easy to chart a course to endgame; it can be difficult to stay on it.

"One of the biggest mistakes in business is to lose focus," says Moore. It’s easy to get distracted by what your competitors are doing. But just because a competitor launched a flashy feature doesn’t mean that you need to match that feature. What you need to do is ask yourself whether matching that feature will advance you towards the goal you’ve already identified. All too many startups, says Moore, behave in a way that’s "reactionary to the market, to competitors, to the newest shiny object."

Punches? Roll With Them

The annals of chess grandmasters are replete with stories of those who obsessively studied their losses. "In every single game," says Moore, "you learn something.... ultimately you have to take all the lessons from every match you played." Those earlier losses will be part of your mental makeup on the eve of a later victory.

After three months of wandering through the weeds, Moore’s team realized that a better predictor of customer satisfaction was the time it took to respond to a customer request.

"The vast majority of startups will fail," says Moore. You have to believe that yours won’t. But part of you has to know, too, that though "it’ll sting, and part of me will be devastated" if yours does fail, ultimately any battle scars will make you stronger and smarter for the next venture.

Pattern Recognition

Playing chess teaches you to recognize patterns: the tempting sacrifice that actually led you into a trap, the queen swap that looked favorable but prevented you from . You play, you learn.

And so with business. Moore tells a story of how pattern recognition helped his business:

In 2011, Moore's team was trying to improve customer satisfaction. They worked from the assumption that one metric in particular—case backlog—was the best predictor of customer satisfaction. It seemed reasonable to assume that if you had low or zero backlog, then your customers would be happy. "It turned out we were wrong," says Moore. After three months of wandering through the weeds, Moore’s team realized that a better predictor of customer satisfaction was the time it took to respond to a customer request, combined with frequency of updates. For months, Axcient had been focusing on the wrong metric.

In 2012, with a larger customer base and a new playbook, Axcient was again trying to improve its customer satisfaction. It was working from the assumption that time-to-response and update frequency were still the key metrics to watch. And yet even as they lowered their response time, Axcient's survey data was "not necessarily supporting what we believed."

Rather than labor under a false assumption for months, Moore and company quickly recognized a pattern—they needed to question and refine their metrics. They rapidly determined that while time-to-response mattered, Axcient customers also deeply cared about getting access to a live Axcient employee. "Now when people call Axcient, in a matter of minutes, they’re connected to a live person," explains Moore. Crucially, Axcient put this fix into place in a matter of weeks, rather than months, having refused to fall into the same trap of relying on a false metric.

Axcient has since investigated and tested all of its key metrics, and has overhauled several.

Know Your Team

A great chess player has a deep awareness of each piece’s role on the board. A bishop has different abilities from those of a , and its powers are expanded or limited by a board’s .

In some ways, chess is a laboratory for human resources problems. "You have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the team, of your employees," says Moore. "You have to understand that the pawn has its role, and it’s a very important one, just as important as the queen, , or bishop. Every piece is critical, and the only way to win is to leverage all those pieces' skill sets together."

hess and the Dynamics of Business by Daaim Shabazz, Ph.D. Over the years there have been many attempts to use chess as metaphor to describe a number of different realities. Business is one of those realities finding a connection to the dynamics of chess given the use of strategy and tactics. However, what I find more often than not are metaphors clumsily assembled or force-fit into business cases. The result is a mish-mash of facts that are confusing only but for the most astute readers. Business is a generic term to describe a number of processes involved in production of products and services. The process is which these activities occur is neither linear nor as organized as a game of chess. Business is war and there are many events occurring simultaneously and at different speeds. Despite this difference, the stories told by a chess game are similar to those that can be told in business. For example, the idea of sacrificing material to gain in the form of an attack on an opponent or positional advantage is something companies do all the time. There is also the concept of an overloaded piece which can occur if a company expands too quickly and spreads resources over a number of areas. There are also situations where a company may develop a commanding in a product line. Bob Rice speaks about "strong squares" in his book, "Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business." What does all of this mean? When studying for my MBA at Clark Atlanta University, Dr. Robert Lynn in Marketing Strategy told us about Karl von Clausewitz' book "On War." He had told us about a Ries and Trout study that referred to von Clausewitz and his theory on attacking. The idea was that you needed at least a 3:1 advantage in resources to engage in a successful frontal attack. Perhaps one can think of chess game where an attack was contemplated. Do I launch a kingside by playing f4, g4 and h4 (or f5, g5 and h5) thus exposing my own castled king to danger. Are my pieces developed to support such an attack? Will I become overextended if my attack peters out?? These are similar questions brand managers and strategists ask when assessing a market.

In the 70s there was a lot of discussion about the Japanese incursion into American automobile markets. The Japanese knew they would not be able to clear a profit during their ascent, so they sacrificed profits to gain market share with their energy-efficient and cheaper cars. Through meticulous production and total quality management (TQM) techniques, the quality of these cars improved rapidly and combined with higher gas prices, American consumers began buying the Hondas, the Toyotas and the Datsuns (now Nissan). When the America auto companies reacted with cheap substitutes (Ford Pinto, Chevy Chevette, Chevy Vega), it was too late. The Japanese were able to increase awareness, grab market share and have never looked back. Japanese cars now command a lion's share of the American market and its cars are popular worldwide and are synonymous with quality.

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of business is preparation for battle. Prior to an inevitable clash, a manager has to have a plan and perhaps launch pre-emptive tactics to deter competitors from entering a market. This also comes with an understanding of the competitors, their strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We often enter a tournament game thinking about our opponent and perhaps we've studied their previous games or have encountered them before. Based upon this intelligence, we develop a strategy that will hopefully help us to meet a strategic end.

This however is ancillary to the preparation that one has to do on their own set of skills. Despite the gathering of intelligence, one does not go into a tournament without some basic preparation of opening strategies and without developing confidence in one's abilities in tactics and strategies. In addition, there is also the idea of establishing a good frame of mind for battle. Perhaps physical fitness becomes a part of this equation… proper rest, diet and meditative techniques. Likewise, companies have to provide some internal support to motivate their employees and provide them with the environment to compete at a high level. Companies such as Microsoft and Google have become famous for their corporate culture which allow their company to stay motivated and prepared to take on competitors at any time. The parallels between business and chess are striking in a number of obvious ways. So much that there are countless company ads that elevate chess to a loft status due to its perceived connection to making intelligent decisions. Of course there are many other characteristics that make chess an attractive pitch.

The idea that chess is a esoteric activity that only a small percentage have mastered gives the impression that one is enlightened. The mistake I often see portrayed in the media is that knowing how to play chess is perceived to be a great accomplishment whether one plays well or not.

Of course, the purpose of business ads and commercials using chess is to merely express a connection to the prestige of the game and not one's proficiency. Most of the public understands that chess involves foresight and this is a quality businesses would claim to have. Business may indeed mirror chess in that there are different stages captured in realizing a strategic end. That strategic end is none other that "checkmating" the opponent… a cliché that we have heard many times in business and politics. Following are some common connections.

1. Business warfare. Definitely true. Many companies act as predators and use many of the same tactics and strategies seen in chess. Starbuck was reputed to lease a vacant storefront to prevent a competitor from renting the space. The execution is not so much a one-to-one correlation with chess as it is the similar themes that result from a company's actions.

2. Stages of Battle. There is an opening, middlegame and ending in chess. The business cycle has similar stages, but the managers will see to it that the cycle will not meet an end unless it advantageous to the company (i.e., buyout or merger). This is done care carefully gauge the transition between these phases. This is also what separates a chess Grandmaster from everyone else.

3. Planning. With the acceleration of the business cycle and the abundance of information managers face, predicting future trends is becoming much harder to do. It may be more practical to (as the great chess champion Emmanual Lasker stated) to think only one move ahead. This appears more accurate than thinking 20 moves in the wrong direction. Of course, neither option is the most efficient and over time, we would find a company with the right mix of erudition and depth.

4. Time. In a war game like chess, each side is given resources, both material (army) and immaterial (time) in which to accomplish a strategic end. Of course, in business the playing field is not level and companies may enter a market with all types of advantages and disadvantages. However, managing time may be one of the most important factors in business success. Timing of market entry or withdrawal; timing of international expansion, timing of supply chain; timing of cash flows. In business, time is everything. It is the only resource that cannot be replenished.

5. Initiative. There is a classic connection since time is a major factor. However, what also matters is what you do with that time. A company cannot sit on its advantage as if time is unlimited. In chess, some schools of though state that initiative may be more important than material. This means that the company on the initiative has the advantage of determining the direction of the market. There have been many cases where industry leaders have lost the edge because they failed to maintain the initiative. Some reacted too late to market changes and thus lost any advantage that they may have had. A few examples are: Ford, IBM, Microsoft, Kodak and of late, Yahoo! GM pitches insurance and financial services. Clearly, chessplayers enjoy the privilege of prestige when telling others they play the royal game. It is no accident that companies requiring strategic insight have recruited chessplayers. There was once an ad recruiting talent in stock trading and commodities brokering. Whether chess abilities translate into tangible business skills could be the subject of an empirical study.