The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

by Jonathan Rowson

A chess grandmaster reveals the powerful teachings this ancient game offers for staying present, thriving in a complex world, and crafting a fulfilling life.

Refined and perfected through 1,500 years of human history, chess has long been a touchstone for shrewd tacticians and master strategists. But what if we thought of the game not as warfare in miniature, but rather as an ever-shifting puzzle to be solved, a narrative to be written, or a task that demands players create their own motivation from moment to moment? Then, as champion player Jonathan Rowson argues in this utterly unique book, it starts to seem as if all of life might be reflected in those 64 black and white squares.

Taking us inside the psychologically charged world of chess's global elite, and into the minds of outstanding players sitting at a board, Rowson mines the game for its dazzling insights into sustaining focus, quieting our inner saboteur, making tough decisions, overcoming failure, and more. He peels back the arcane rules and wondrous logic of chess to reveal the timeless wisdom underneath. This exhilarating tour ranges from how to love our mistakes to how people are like trees, from the mysteries of parenting to the beauty of technical details, to the endgame of death. Throughout, chess emerges as a powerful-and surprisingly accessible-metaphor for the thrills and setbacks that invest our daily lives with meaning and beauty.

Genres: Chess, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Memoir, Biography, Games

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Jonathan Rowson is a Scottish chess player and philosopher. He is a three-time British chess champion and was awarded the title of Grandmaster by FIDE in 1999. As Director of the Social Brain Centre at the United Kingdom's Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), he authored numerous research reports on behavior change, climate change, and spirituality. He was awarded an Open Society Fellowship in 2018 by the Open Society Foundations. He now works as an intellectual entrepreneur and civil society leader as co-founder and Chief Executive of Perspectiva.

Reviews

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will write more about this amazing book. Rowson is the most intelligent and thoughtful chess author, and in this book he puts our game in the context of life. If chess is a game and games don't really matter, and we only have 30,000 days on the planet why spend time on chess? To me the key is the idea is life itself is ridiculous and meaningless, and yet we should treat it as if it matters. Chess, it turns out is the same. You get to spend time in a struggle that ultimately doesn't matter, but for a short time you get to make it the one thing that matters more than anything.

I could not recommend this book more to any chess player, or anyone who is mystified by a chess lover in their life.

[Timothy Ha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This author is a friend

I don’t know Jonathan Rowson personally, yet this book, more than his famous chess books, made him one of my author-friends. We share many common views on life and approach chess the same way, too (although I’m an amateur, and he's a grandmaster). His nuggets of wisdom are well collected and even if sometimes he might be repetitious or obvious, he’s a great friend to turn to and have a good candid talk with. I also find the audio version read by the author himself even better for bringing him to his audience. Thanks, Jonathan!

http://bit.ly/RowsonMovesThatMatter

[Bon Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm starting to notice a pattern. Books about metaphysics of chess tend to be extraordinarily good, in every possible sense. The writing, the technique, the hints to the penultimate truths about nature of universe and life itself, all extrapolated from the simple 8x8 board with silly figurines waging a simulacrum of war. It's silly, and yet, it's all that matter while it lasts. Just like life itself. It's just one of the points the book is trying to make, but of course, it does it in much more elegant and elaborate way. It's also something of an autobiographic revelation about author's own relationship to chess and his place in that food chain, which is straight to the point and honest. This is a masterpiece of non-fictional writing, and it goes straight to that shelf.

[Fred Forbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a lover of chess, I was pleased at the explanation of the joys, challenges and beauty of the game. But the side trips into philosophy, literature, religion, travel, societies and pop culture are what make the book so entertaining. Well written. I'm not sure that a non-chess fan would find it entertaining as I did but other than some notated games and positions in the appendix the actual chess content is limited so don't let a lack of familiarity with the game keep you from an interesting read.

[J Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The move that matters. When life, chess and philosophy are interwoven

This singular book can be classified in several subjects: autobiography, chess, philosophy… but the important question is how the reader resonates through these issues. Just in my case, it was very high in despite that I have not played a lot of chess in my life. However, chess could be the excuse or just the metaphor as Rowson says to engage in our lives. Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out this way: “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”

The idea of the book is simple but powerful, i.e., Rowson has played chess as a Great Master but at the same time he’s been educated as a philosopher. Both plots converge in the chessboard through the 64 four quadrants. Every quadrant is a little chapter interwoven his life and some big philosophical ideas. It’s a kind of I Ching where every of the 64 pieces try to resonate with your life because the ideas of every chapter are almost universal: death, life, power, love, thinking, feeling, learning, losing, truth, beauty…

In a similar way to the idea of reading books by Ursula K. Le Guin, the German sociologist Harmurt Rosa propose the idea of resonance. This book will probably resonate with you, Harmurt says that we know that a relationship is resonant when 4 elements are fulfilled.

1st Affection, the subject feel touched by the other one. In this case, the bio of Jonathan Rowson will impress you. You will feel some affection to this man.
2nd e-movere in Latin, to open to the ideas. This could the philosophical part of the book and if you read through those universal ideas slowly and deeply, you will be open to new insights.
3rd Transformation. After mixing both the connexion of his bio with the philosophical ideas, one could start to change or to see the things from other perspective. A second reading would be recommended for fixing the new insights and maybe to start some transformation
4th Unavailability. Resonance cannot be guaranteed, sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, and one doesn’t know what the result will be or how long it will last. In this case my recommendation would be to have a look to the book, and I think that something will resonate with you in the end.

Regarding what resonates more with me, there are a lot of things and ideas, for example I have married to a person from other culture, and I have 2 children with similar ages to the author. I wanted to develop a kind of societal index (beyond GDP), close to the idea of happiness or wellbeing during my Master Thesis but finally my supervisor changed my mind and I developed a model (16 quadrants) extensible to 64 as a kind of chessboard of sustainability/wellbeing for our society where every quadrant is complementary to the whole idea. Like the author I have played the I Ching several times and I like paradoxes. The book is so wide in anecdotes, ideas and experiences that probably other readers will be resonated with other things because as Carl Rogers pointed out “what is most personal is most universal” and it could be the other direction, what is most universal (the big ideas of the book) is most personal.

Finally, during my reading I wrote down quite a lot of notes and some sentences that could be excellent quotations. Here some of them:

“The best kinds of freedom involve choosing your constraints wisely and claiming them as your own.”

“I think of metaphor as the creative device we use more or less to construct meaning through shifts in context, relationships and perspective.”

“The more credible threat is that our imaginative capacity will shrink because the algorithms will keep presenting us with our own hall of mirrors and we’ll forget there is a world beyond our own techno-social algorithmic echo chamber.”

“We need to know ourselves biologically to understand ourselves psychologically. Paradoxically, we need to realise we are animals in order to become fully human.”

“Success, after all, is not what one has achieved in life, but what one has overcome to achieve it.”

“We might agree that the purpose of the economic system should be prosperity, but that could mean simply speed and volume of economics output, or it could be an improvement in some fundamental qualities of life, like levels of social trust, ecological health, cultural depth and vitality, and emotional wellbeing.”

[Raz Pirata · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Decisions are often framed in the context of strategy and leadership as singular moments of destiny, but they are more like repeated challenges and matters of character.”

I could count all the complete games of chess I've played in my life with my fingers. I guess I preferred the games, puzzles and mysteries I encountered to come with the possible threat of a punch to the face. Or maybe I just couldn’t sit still long enough or didn’t have the discipline required. I did, however, marvel at those that could. The pieces and patterns of the game always mesmerized me. The idea of two participants locked in a contest of intellect and will.

To me chess somehow felt like something more than a game though. I had an inescapable sense that I was missing something subtle and fantastic that hid in the shadows of the pawns, rooks, knights and bishops. It turns out; I was right.

“Mostly we are strangers to ourselves and each other, hungry for insight, meaning and refuge to get us through the day.”

In one of the most engaging and thought-provoking books of recent memory, Jonathan Rowson’s, The Moves That Matter - A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life, leaves the reader intellectually exhausted and completely satisfied.

Using chess as a meta-metaphor for a deep and provoking philosophical investigation of the meaning and magnitude of life, love, death and the pursuit of concentration, The Moves That Matter stuns with its depth of perspective and the breadth of its coverage. It shares tales of chess legends and games of historical and cultural significance. More importantly though, it changes the way you see the world and your place in it. It challenges you to rethink your moments, your pursuits and purpose. To examine your losses and wins and the lessons they taught. The Moves That Matter forces you to look long and hard at yourself to see what perhaps you have been ignoring or been unwilling to admit.

“There is no particular algorithm for finding good ideas, so mostly we amble among whatever seems interesting, trusting the important to reveal itself.”

This book is an achievement in every sense of the word. Beautifully written and intellectually stimulating while still being accessible to anyone who has not spent countless hours over a chessboard. The Moves that Matter will, like any worthy challenge, stay with you long after you have finished and teach you lessons long into your future. A book so rich in language, image and knowledge that I am waiting in anticipation to see what the next reading will reveal.

Overall Score: 5 / 5

In a Sentence: An achievement and required reading for anyone curious about what it all means. It’s your move.

[Austin May · Rating 2 out of 5]

So. many. empty. calories. There are DOZENS of pages where the author strings together as many sophisticated words he can think of in an attempt to convey something profound. It started to feel like reading a memoir written by ChatGPT. He seasoned the meat with way too much salt and spoiled it.

[Horaz100 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main part of the book is structured in 8 chapters which each contain an introduction and 8 subchapters, so in total 64 “vignettes” as Rowson calls it. The titles of the chapters are for example “Thinking and Feeling”, “Winning and Losing” or the last chapter “Life and Death”. In each vignette Rowson shares his experiences and thoughts, which are often from the world of chess or his family.
In his own words he tries to answer a question: “This book is a philosophical offering on chess as a metaphor for life as a whole. The question that drives my inquiry is, simply: what has chess taught me about life?” A bit later he defines a metaphor “as the creative device we use more or less consciously to construct meaning through shifts in context, relationship and perspective.”
I am an amateur chess player and enjoyed it a lot when Rowson gives insight in the professional world of chess. His anecdotes of his time as a member of the Anand Team preparing for the world championship are a good read, likewise his stories from chess tournaments are interesting. I wish he would have elaborated more on the situation when he gradually realized that he would not become a world class player and making a decent living only by playing chess would be difficult. Even though he touches this topic I am intrigued to hear more about it. How does it feel when you realize you are extraordinarily good in what you’re doing, in fact better than 99,99998% of the world population, and yet it is impossible to become a member of the absolute top or even live from it? I feel that this topic would have deserved more time in the book, in particular as it deals with the crossroad where you need to decide to give up or not your chess career in order to build and support a family.
What I enjoyed much less are Rowson’s musings about life. There are a few books and essays which deal with the question what chess can teach about life. I have yet to read the first book with an acceptable answer and to me Rowson fails in this task as well. My personal conclusion so far is that playing chess has not much practical relevance in life. Anyway, these parts of the book are very difficult to read and often I felt I was not intellectually prepared and knowledgeable enough to follow his train of thoughts. Jonathan Rowson is a very smart and intelligent guy and has a degree in Philosophy. I’m simply not on his level to really understand what he has to say (have you understood his definition of a metaphor which I quoted at the beginning of this review?). On the other hand this is possibly the book where I left the highest number of highlights (I read it on a Kindle and highlighted lots of interesting thoughts, quotes and ideas. The author really left some treasure there.) By the way, I’m following him on Twitter and while a lot of his tweets are interesting there are also a lot of tweets I don’t even bother to try to understand.
I’m writing this review a couple of months after I finished the book. Thinking back, I asked myself what do I still remember, what have I taken away and learnt? Unfortunately, nothing concrete comes to my mind, except the chess episodes to which I can relate.
Would I read it again? No, not unless I achieved a philosophical degree myself. I prefer to browse through his excellent book “The seven deadly chess sins”.

[Matthew Worley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jonathan Rowson provides a rambling narrative that ultimately strikes one as slightly contrived. The structure of the writing exhibits the author’s intelligence and logical thought, but also belies the inexperience of the author expressing those thoughts in an entertaining and creative manner.

While the ideas are noteworthy and thought-provoking, the style sadly saps the story of its potential. Like the show House, every chapter is an episode that follows a pattern, and as the style devolves into tiringly cloying, we never do get to see that case of lupus.

[Anish · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Chess is not the meaning of life, but it does simulate conditions for a life of meaning”
“the best kinds of freedom involve choosing your constraints wisely and claiming them as your own.”

A Chess grandmaster trying to find the meaning of life in his games.
Reading this gives a peek into the mind of chess players, how they seek to think, learn, educate, and liberate themselves through defeating each other and in a way finding themselves in the process.

The book goes on to discuss thinking, finding logical faults in our own patterns of thinking and challenging ourselves, and persisting under social pressure. The book is deeply philosophical in nature featuring brilliant excerpts from philosophers, psychoanalysts, and the best thinkers of our time, and tries to apply them to chess and then to life which overall makes the book a deeply worthy read. Rowson is vulnerable while sharing instances from his personal life. In a day and age where we have been made pawns to our own basest desires and there is a higher need to pause and reflect back from doomscrolling , this will be a worthy read.
As Brian Wall says
“Chess is basically a fight between the pain of losing and the pain of thinking”
May we all choose pain now, the pain of thinking and living better.

[Sergio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnifica obra autobiográfica del GM escocés, campeón británico en tres ocasiones. Alcanzó el puesto 144 en el ranking Fide con 2599 puntos de ELO en 2005.

[Shu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked out this book as a comparative study against a book on life in the context of poker, and wound up spending almost a quarter of a year with it, maxing out my renewals with the library because it compelled me to take time to mull over each chapter. Beautifully written and intellectually demanding, this book was a comforting companion for me to get through a pandemic winter.

Modeled after the chessboard, there are 64 life topics organized in 8 themes. Amongst the 50+ tabs I stuck and 4 pages of typed-up notes I took, I particularly resonated with the author on the following parts:

“... shared attention over any process of co-creation is a rare and profoundly intimate process.”
when recalling playing chess nightly with my husband during our honeymoon.

“Freedom is about building a boat to sail on the open seas, but it is ultimately more like building than sailing.”
when getting into the weeds still, even after 16 years of growing a “startup.”

“Chess taught me that the real purpose of planning in life is not so much to get to where you want to be, but to strengthen the willpower that you will need to get to a good place of any kind.”
when starting my first paper planner to track my book reading habits in 2021.

“Perhaps the game’s culture role is therefore to give play its proper due as a moral touchstone, and an end in itself.”
when trying to merge play with work and equate work ethic with play ethic.

“Somehow we need to preserve a fluid sense of who we are in a data-driven world that perpetually reinforces one idea of who we are to serve somebody else’s interests.”
when fighting my addiction to the algorithmic feeds on my phone.

“I believe the decision to have children is about making ourselves real through responsibility and joy and meaning, not happiness... While choosing children is choosing ‘weight’ in Kundera’s sense, I now think choosing chess is ultimately about choosing ‘lightness’.”
when struggling to support my kids’ DLP while WFH.

The book is like a chess game - the more you invest in it, the more you will harvest from it. If you are a chess lover, the “Notes” section showcases many games containing moves with the “!!” notation. But, IMO, the main text is really for anyone who loves to ponder about life, even those with rudimentary knowledge of the chess game and the chess world like me.

[Rolanda Crockpot]

distilling the timeless and the universal from a game is a preoccupation that comes from wanting justify your life to people or a superego who might not be so charitable. still, we all have to do it at one point or another, it’s probably not an altogether bad thing, and anyway rowson’s is the best account of this kind from any chess player. i would have liked him to address this existential preoccupation more directly even though doing so may have demanded more from each individual yarn.

regardless, the passage on women in chess is the best i’ve ever seen and I applaud it for going in the sort of beauvoirian direction that it did apart from the unfortunately more common cooky pseudoscientific sexisms and naive lean-in liberalisms.

not much on community, specifically that of the clubs, parks and parlors, which is something the chess world used to have more of and which I suspect used to be the surrogate for a lot of club players’ need for a sense of meaning in activity. but you can’t really blame a grandmaster for preferring the tech talk to be about how engines changed the game than how the internet and neoliberalism changed the life of the game.

[Woutervangysel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too many personal anecdotes but interesting view of chess and the role of chess in one’s life. The general philosophical points are the ones that will stay with me.

[Matias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Como aficionado al ajedrez desde joven siempre me gustan los libros que hablan del ajedrez desde un punto de vista cultural, espiritual o de las ciencias neurocognitivas.

El autor no sólo trata el ajedrez desde todos los puntos de vista imaginables, sino que al mismo tiempo nos cuenta su experiencia como jugador profesional durante su juventud.
Tengo que decir que la experiencia con el ajedrez de un jugador que ha llegado a ser GM es diferente a la que tiene un jugador que siempre ha sido aficionado. En mi caso nunca he superado una fuerza práctica de más de 2.200 ELO, y la mayor parte de mi vida he estado entre 2.000-2.100, a pesar de haber leído numerosos libros y haber jugado innumerables partidas. Sin embargo nunca he tenido el nivel de obsesión que he observado en algunos jugadores.

Me han gustado algunas observaciones del autor en cuanto al tema de la concentración. Realmente el conseguir concentrarse en algo, haciendo callar a la voz interior que no deja de interferir, es uno de los grandes logros que puede conseguir una persona para alcanzar la libertad, o el equilibrio o la felicidad. Que esto se consiga con el ajedrez o con la meditación es un detalle.

Otra idea que aparece de alguna manera en el libro es el carácter sagrado de la partida, especialmente cuando es de torneo, y la inmersión que consigue el jugador siempre que consiga el efecto de jugar 'como si importara realmente'. Cuando pierdes ese sentimiento de que lo que estás haciendo es lo más importante que podrías estar haciendo y te das cuenta que el ajedrez no deja de ser un juego y que hay más cosas en la vida, entonces se pierde un poco la magia del ajedrez de torneo y se pierde la motivación para jugar a tu máximo nivel. A mí me suele pasar cuando llevo jugando demasiado (por ejemplo en un torneo abierto de 9 días seguidos al quinto o sexto considero que estoy harto de jugar y preferiría que se acabase ya el torneo, aunque a los dos días de no jugar ya tenga ganas de jugar de nuevo).

En algunos momento el autor se adentra en profundidades filosóficas que no me han interesado demasiado y a veces relaciona el ajedrez de una forma un tanto forzada con diferentes temas, como cuando relaciona la Pascua y el sacrificio de Cristo con el sacrificio de material en una partida de ajedrez. Me ha dado la impresión que a veces el autor quiere forzar demasiado las analogías.

Libro recomendable incluso para personas que nunca hayan jugado al ajedrez, pues siempre que hay algún término técnico el autor lo explica perfectamente. Si has sido aficionado 'serio' al ajedrez (has leído libros, has jugado federado...) entonces es un libro muy bonito de leer, pues te reconoces en algunos pensamientos del autor con respecto al ajedrez.

[Eli Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one that I'll need to re-read sometime later in life. I'm not sure how compelling this book would be for someone who's not interested in chess but is interested in philosophy, but for me, someone who's the opposite, I found it hard to get through some of the more densely philosophical sections. I did enjoy it, though, especially the stories about chess—I'm just not sure if it was right for me at this point in my life.

A few quotes, as there were many that impressed:
"Our heroes appear through the questions we ask of life, and we live some of the answers vicariously through them." (p. 77)
"In any case, it is so much better to regret the things you have done than the things you haven't." (155)
"But then I was reminded of the saying of Mary Anne Radmacher: 'Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow."'" (266)

[Adi Royyuru · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very personal and honest take on life and its intersection with chess. Rowson has refreshing perspective on psychology, philosophy, and spirituality through his life stories as a chess player and beyond.

The book is a bit scattered, organized as eight thematic chapters with eight subsections each that represent the 64 squares of a chess board. I find the themes extremely broad and difficult to parse together shared threads of meaning.

Regardless, I learned a lot about psychology and philosophy by reading this book and enjoyed the correlations to chess including the interesting bits of chess history.

It’s an interesting book focused on personal al philosophy and experience, but I had difficulty pushing through and finishing the read due to the wide breadth and lack of continuity from different strains of thought.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rowson is a master chess player who also has a set of skills and interests beyond chess—which makes him an interesting commentator on the game. He’s humane, erudite, and a clear writer.

And yet I found myself impatient with this book. One reason has to do with how Rowson deals with sources. He tends to mine everything he reads for a nugget of wisdom, a quotable snippet. It grows tiresome. More important, though, is that there seems no real arc or structure to the book—it’s just one insight after the other, without a strong sense of a through-line connecting them.

In the end, Rowson seems a smart and charming guy, but I’m not sure what I take away from the book.

[Neil Krasnoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an impulse decision when shopping at the end of year 50% off sale at B&N. I was pretty happy with the purchase. The book is arranged into 64 vignettes, one of each square of the chess board. I found approximately the first 3 ranks or 24 squares very thought-provoking and quotable. I would even go back and re-read that much to retain more of the life lessons. However, it seems as though the author ran out of insightful material at that point and the book became mostly a self-indulgent exercise in autobiography. That being said, I would certainly want to ready more of Jonathan Rowson's writing. He's a clear thinker and a good human being.

[Barb Cherem · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are masterfully philosophical lines throughout this thoughtful book, but somehow difficult to read in spots.

I love Jonathan's observations and way different perspectives from what the game of chess usually delivers in terms of parallels to life in terms of strategy and planning and the like; this book goes way further and deeper in some very poignant points, and for these reasons I liked it a lot.

[Tasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the concept is interesting, the author made conclusory statements without explaining and showing 'why' or 'how.' I think the author tried to fit too many principles into one book and thus lacked the space to explain them in depth. It was quantity over quality.

[Siddharth Shankar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book on chess, life and philosophy. Jonathan is brilliant in explaining psychology of human mind through chess, whether you like chess or not this is really a thought provoking book. "If Chess is just a game then heart is also just a muscle"

[Anup · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've finished reading the book but I still need to play through a few games on the appendix. One of my favorite chess authors hasn't decided. It's just that I found out about this book a little too late.

[Lindsay Counsell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very high four.

[Temuulen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will write later...

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tried to do too much in too little. Jonathan's search for some unifying truth of everything reflects his own life. Conflicted between various options and not doing a great job at any of them.

[Alessandro Orlandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was OK

[Anika Molesworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not your average book on climate change - but a great perspective. I don't play chess, but it made me want to!

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Libro poco scorrevole fatto di concetti generali forzatamente adattati al mondo degli scacchi.
Con una leggibilità migliore probabilmente non lo avrei abbandonato al 30%.

[Elliot Y]

Was kindof eh - maybe not in the mood to hear a book on this topic at the moment (maybe like 60 pages in - don't remember)