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Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity.
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 caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought.
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.
Then when I was eighteen years old I stumbled upon a little book called the Tao Te Ching, and my life took a turn. I was moved by the book’s natural wisdom and I started delving into other Buddhist and Taoist philosophical texts. I recognized that being at the pinnacle in other people’s eyes had nothing to do with quality of life, and I was drawn to the potential for inner tranquility.
I began taking classes and after a few weeks I found myself practicing the meditative movements for hours at home. Given the complicated nature of my chess life, it was beautifully liberating to be learning in an environment in which I was simply one of the beginners—and something felt right about this art. I was amazed by the way my body pulsed with life when flowing through the ancient steps, as if I were tapping into a primal alignment.
Beautiful
His insight into body mechanics seemed magical, but perhaps equally impressive was Chen’s humility. Here was a man thought by many to be the greatest living Tai Chi Master in the world, and he patiently taught first-day novices with the same loving attention he gave his senior students.
I was feeling flow, filling space left behind, riding waves like I do at sea or in martial arts. This was wild! I was winning chess games without playing chess.
I remember sitting on a Bermuda cliff one stormy afternoon, watching waves pound into the rocks. I was focused on the water trickling back out to sea and suddenly knew the answer to a chess problem I had been wrestling with for weeks. Another time, after completely immersing myself in the analysis of a chess position for eight hours, I had a breakthrough in my Tai Chi and successfully tested it in class that night.
Oscillate
Training in the ability to quickly lower my heart rate after intense physical strain helped me recover between periods of exhausting concentration in chess tournaments. After several years of cloudiness, I was flying free, devouring information, completely in love with learning.
Yes
I related to my experience with language like parallel learning and translation of level.
I discovered some interesting foundations for my experience in ancient Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Greek texts—Upanishadic essence, Taoist receptivity, Neo-Confucian principle, Buddhist nonduality, and the Platonic forms all seemed to be a bizarre cross-cultural trace of what I was searching for.
I sometimes refer to it as the study of numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form.
Very strong chess players will rarely speak of the fundamentals, but these beacons are the building blocks of their mastery.
A lifetime of competition has not cooled my ardor to win, but I have grown to love the study and training above all else. After so many years of big games, performing under pressure has become a way of life. Presence under fire hardly feels different from the presence I feel sitting at my computer, typing these sentences. What I have realized is that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess—what I am best at is the art of learning. This book is the story of my method.
Riveting
I’d plop down against some scary-looking dude, put my game face on, and go to war. I loved the thrill of battle, and some days I would play countless speed chess games, hour after hour staring through the jungle of pieces, figuring things out, throwing mental grenades back and forth in a sweat. I would go home with chess pieces flying through my mind, and then I would ask my dad to take down his dusty wooden set and play with me.
The art of the interview as a battle as well
wealthy gamblers hooked on the game, junkies, eccentric artists—all diamonds in the rough, brilliant, beat men, lives in shambles, aflame with a passion for chess.
Each loss was a lesson, each win a thrill. Every day pieces of the puzzle fell together.
Yes
of adults talking about him, but when well focused, I seemed to hover in an in-between state where the intensity of the chess position mixed with the rumble of voices, traffic noises, ambulance sirens, all in an inspiring swirl that fueled my mind. Some days I could concentrate more purely in the chaos of Washington Square than in the quiet of my family’s living room. Other days I would look around at everybody, get caught up in their conversations, and play terribly. I’m sure it was frustrating for my parents watching my early discovery of chess—there was no telling whether I’d chew gummy
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were an intimate fantasy world. I had to trust someone to let them into my thought process, and Bruce had to overcome this shield before the work could begin.
Yes!!
I learned to develop my pieces, to control the center, to prepare attacks systematically.
He had to teach me to be more disciplined without dampening my love for chess or suppressing my natural voice. Many teachers have no feel for this balance and try to force their students into cookie-cutter molds. I have run into quite a few egomaniacal instructors like this over the years and have come to believe that their method is profoundly destructive for students in the long run—in any case, it certainly would not have worked with me.
Yes
He didn’t present himself as omniscient, and he handled himself as more of a guide in my development than as an authority. If I disagreed with him, we would have a discussion, not a lecture.
Bruce slowed me down by asking questions. Whenever I made an important decision, good or bad, he would ask me to explain my thought process. Were there other ways to accomplish the same aim? Had I looked for my opponent’s threats? Did I consider a different order of operations? Bruce didn’t patronize me—some teachers rebel so far away from being authoritarian that they praise all their little player’s decisions, good or bad. Their intention is to build confidence, but instead they discourage objectivity, encourage self-indulgence, and perhaps most destructively, they create a dishonest
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Coaching!!!
pupil that any bright child can sense.
Bruce did not want to feed me information, but to help my mind carve itself into maturity.
Wow yes coaching
he never let technical material smother my innate feeling for the game.
Foster intuition as a coach
the street-tough competitor had to fuse with the classically trained, patient player that Bruce was inspiring.
Potent mix of high and low to forge greatness
sometimes sitting in silence and calculating an endgame position for twenty minutes would thrill me to the core. But other times such serious thinking would bore me and I’d hunger to play speed chess with my buddies, to attack, to be a little reckless and create beautiful combinations. The park was fun. I was a child after all.
Awesome
because they wanted my relationship to the game to be about learning and passion first, and competition a distant second.
For me, competitive chess was not about perfection. It was more of a mental prizefight, with two opponents trading advantages, momentum going one way and then the other.
Right!! Enjoy the fight - revel in it
never count them out—in fact they were most dangerous when on the ropes. Many very talented kids expected to win without much resistance. When the game was a struggle, they were emotionally unprepared. I thrived under adversity. My style was to make the game complex and then work my way through the chaos. When the position was wild, I had huge confidence. Bruce and I also spent a lot of time studying endgames, where the board is nearly empty and high-level principles combine with deep calculations to create fascinating battles. While my opponents wanted to win in the openings, right off the
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Perhaps the most decisive element of my game was the way my style on the board was completely in synch with my personality as a child. I was unhindered by internal conflict—a state of being that I have come to see as fundamental to the learning process. Bruce and the park guys had taught me how to express myself through chess, and so my love for the game grew every day.
Wow this is important
after win and my national rating skyrocketed. I’d show up at a tournament and kids were terrified of me, which felt strange. I was, after all, a young child who was scared of the dark and loved Scooby-Doo. More than once, opponents started weeping at the board before the game had even begun.
top board is a throne or a prison, depending on how you look at it.
Dave and I would become best friends. But right now he was just a buck-toothed little blond kid who looked petrified.
dangerous attacking position, chasing my overextended knight who had nowhere safe to hide. I’d been stupid to grab the pawn. Now this smart little kid was going after my king and I was fighting for my life. I can see my eight-year-old self as the game slipped away, sitting at the board, sweat beginning
Confidence is critical for a great competitor, but overconfidence is brittle.
destructing, falling apart. Was I a loser? Had I let my parents down? What about the guys in the park, Bruce, my friends at school? How could I have lost? One of the problems with being too high is that there is a long way to fall. Had I fallen in my own eyes or also in the eyes of those around me? After trying so hard, was there worth outside of winning? An eight-year-old is hardly prepared to deal with such loaded issues, and I was very fortunate to have a family with the ability to keep, or at least regain, a bit of perspective in times of extreme intensity. We went fishing.
winning? An eight-year-old is hardly prepared to deal with such loaded issues, and I was very fortunate to have a family with the ability to keep, or at least regain, a bit of perspective in times of extreme intensity. We went fishing.
Growing up, I knew that come summertime, we would head off to sea no matter what else was happening in our lives, what crisis was looming, what tournaments I was missing, how out of context or absurd our ocean trips might have felt at the moment of departure. I have come to understand that these little breaks from the competitive intensity of my life have been and still are an integral part of my success. Times at sea are periods of renewal, coming together with family, being with nature, putting things back in perspective. I am able to let my conscious mind move away from my training, and to
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There have been many years when leaving my New York life felt like career suicide—my chess rivals were taking lessons and competing in every weekend tournament while I was on a boat crashing through big waves. But I would come back with new ideas and a full tank of energy and determination.
We fished, dove in warm crystal-clear water, trolled the Gulf Stream, breathed in the beautiful southern air.
I didn’t have to tell her how I felt—she knew. My mother is the greatest person I have ever known. She is a brilliant, loving, compassionate woman with a wisdom that to this day blows my mind. Quietly powerful, infinitely supportive, absurdly selfless, she has always encouraged me to follow my heart even when it led far away or to seemingly bizarre pursuits.
My mom is my hero. Without her the whole thing falls apart.
I recall the feeling of inevitability, like chess was part of me, not to be denied. Something steeled in my eight-year-old self that summer—I wouldn’t go out a loser.
I was a mess. My chess life had fallen apart, my teacher didn’t like me anymore, I missed my friends, and my family didn’t have a doorman or a fancy car. On top of all this a pretty girl I had a crush on at school had developed the habit of hitting me over the head with her shoes, which I didn’t realize (until she told me many years later) was a sign that she shared my feelings.
We started doing arduous visualization work, playing blindfold chess games and working through long variations in our heads, without moving the pieces.
I arrived at a commitment to chess that was about much more than fun and glory. It was about love and pain and passion and pushing myself to overcome. It might sound absurd, but I believe that year, from eight to nine, was the defining period of my life. I responded to
heartbreak with hard work. I was self-motivated and moved by a powerful resolve. While a young boy, I had been all promise. I only knew winning because I was better than all the other children and there was no pressure competing against adults. Now there was the knowledge of my mortality. I had lost to a kid, and there were other children who were also dangerous rivals.
