Description

How Life Imitates ChessMaking the Right Moves, from the Board to the BoardroomGarry Kasparov has written How Life Imitates Chess about the insights he gained from his grandmaster days.Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion extraordinaire, applies lessons gleaned from the game of chess to the game of life. Preparation, practice, evaluation, strategy, tactics, intuition, creativity, commitment, and spontaneity are all topics that get plenty of anecdotal treatment from his experiences sitting at the chess board in the heat of battle. However, the retelling of the chess legacy’s key matches and minute decisions at critical junctures sometimes overwhelms the lessons themselves. That said, the material still contains nuggets of wisdom and insight that make it worth investing the time to listen.How Life Imitates Chess is a primer on how to think, make decisions, prepare strategies and anticipate the future. Kasparov has distilled the lessons he learned over a lifetime as a Chess grandmaster to cover the practical side—tactics, strategy, preparation—as well as the subtler, more human arts of using memory, intuition, and imagination. It’s a remarkably honest audiobook in which Kasparov—one of the world’s most celebrated and successful competitors—details both his blunders and his victories, always with the intent to enable readers to absorb his lessons and do better for themselves.For example, Garry “describes a game against Alexei Shirov in which, rather than retreat his attacked queen,” he imagines what it would be like if he just continued his strategy without her. So he sacrifices the queen, increases the activity of his other pieces, and pressures his opponent into blundering into a loss.His insight is this: “Imagination is valuable, and it is a habit that can be developed.” Elsewhere in the book, Garry suggests that “talent and hard work are not necessarily opposing explanations for chess success: The ability to work hard may itself be a talent.”That’s a relief! More important, Garry “proposes not that chess was his life (though it was), or that chess is like life (all games are, to some extent), but that life is so much like chess that deep insights can be found by comparing the two.”Length: 6 hrs and 43 minsFiles: 16 MP3s (96 kbit)