This document summarizes key points from a book about how life imitates chess. It discusses how chess requires constant decision making under pressure using strategy, calculation, and creativity. The book is divided into sections on strategy, talent, and preparation. It emphasizes constantly evaluating your strategy and position for improvements, using time efficiently to achieve quality over just material gains, and viewing crises as opportunities for growth rather than just dangers.

1. How life imitates chess
Krishnan
GTC Book
Review Talk
April 22, 2012

3. Chess mimics real life decision
making
 Chess is a laboratory for the decision making
process
 Have to make constant stream of exact,
informed decisions
 Decisions made in real-time and under pressure
 Requires calculation, creativity and desire for
results

4. Three parts of the book
 Part 1 – Strategy, calculation, preparation
 Part 2 – Evaluation and analysis
 What changes are needed and why
 Part 3 – Ongoing, continous performance
improvement

5. Strategy, Talent, Preparation

6. Strategy
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to
victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise
before defeat – Sun Tzu
The question “Why ?” separates visionaries from
functionaries
William Boeing – invested in superior technology
Play your own game – Aware of your own
strengths and weaknesses

7. Why ?
• “Why?” is the question that separates
visionaries from functionaries, great strategists
from mere tacticians. You must ask this
question constantly if you are to understand and
develop and follow your strategy
• … our goal is to improve our position. You must
avoid creating weaknesses, find small ways to
improve your pieces, and think small – but never
stop thinking.

8. Strategy
If you are employing a powerful and successful
strategy, whether gaining space on the
chessboard or market share in global commerce,
the competition will try to trip you up by getting
you to abandon it. If your plans are sound and
your tactical awareness is good, your competitor
can only succeed with your help.

9. On Change
Change can be essential, but it should only be
made with careful consideration and just cause.
Losing can persuade you to change what does not
need to be changed, and winning can convince
you everything is fine even if you are on the brink
of disaster. If you are quick to blame faulty
strategy and change it all the time, you don’t really
have any strategy at all.

10. Talent
When I was eleven, I just got good – Bobby
Fischer
Tal doesnt move the pieces by hand, he uses a
magic wand
Tal's pieces seemed to move faster than his
opponents
Dragging a hippo out of a marsh story
Developing the habit of imagination

11. Preparation
If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed
– Thomas Wolfe
Jose Raul Capablanca vs. Alexander Alekhine
- World championship, Buenos Aires, 1927
- Capablanca didnt prepare much, Alekhine was
fanatical about his preparation (8 hrs / day)
Alekhine won the match

12. Preparation
If you said you didn’t have enough time, that
meant you were not well organized.
Botvinnik summed up his philosophy by stating,
“The difference between man and animal is that
man is capable of establishing priorities!”

13. On working hard
It’s not enough to be talented. It’s not enough to
work hard and to study late into the night. You
must also become intimately aware of the
methods you use to reach your decisions.

14. Calculation
A computer may look at millions of moves per
second, but lacks a deep sense of why one move
is better than another; this capacity for evaluation
is where computers falter and humans excel. It
doesn’t matter how far ahead you see if you don’t
understand what you are looking at.

15. Material, Time, Quality
.

16. Material
Material – describes tangible assets
Personal attachment to assets that do not have a
true value
Chess teaches there is much more to life than
material
All pieces are of no use if the king is gone

17. Time
Clock time – Time to make moves
Board time – Number of moves to achieve an
objective
Time can be swapped for material – E.g. More
money for express delivery
Mikhail Tal – the ultimate time player, did not care
much for material

18. Quality
A knight in the center is more valuable than one
on the edge
A knight on the rim is dim
In warfare, the highest ground is sought
e.g. Kargil
Jack Welch – Kept the best GE businesses
No 1 or 2 in the market

19. Expanding powers of evaluation
Choosing a house – Trading material for quality
Dont fall too much in love with your bishops (in
chess) or the corner office
By using time wisely and putting material to good
use, we can achieve quality (=happiness)

20. Material, Time, Quality
But I believe that by using your time wisely you
can put all your material to your best advantage
and achieve the ultimate goal of quality. That’s the
promise of the material-time-quality concept–in
chess and in life.

21. Exchanges and imbalances
Microsoft exchanged material for quality in the
browser wars
Used its cash and placement advantages
If we can detect or cultivate a weak spot in our
opponent’s position, we can then attempt to
transform our position to take advantage of that
weakness

22. Phases of the game
So dedicate yourself to making the time, finding a
space in which you can think and learn, and
finding new ideas with which to shock your
adversaries.

23. Question Success
• Question the status quo at all times, especially when
things are going well. When something goes wrong,
you naturally want to do it better next time ,but you
must train yourself to want to do it better even when
things go right
• That’s why I always think of Simon Bolivar and
remember that experienced soldier who studies
the battlefields in the aftermath of the war returns with
both wisdom and renewed courage.

24. Intuition
As they develop, our instincts–our intuitive
senses–become labor-saving and time-saving
devices; they literally cut down the time it takes to
make a proper evaluation and act. You can collect
and analyze new information forever without ever
making a decision. Something has to tell you
when the law of diminishing returns is kicking in.
And that something is intuition.

25. Crisis point
• Everything is condensed into one single
moment, it decides our life – Franz Kafka
• The best indicator of a chess player’s form is to
detect the climax of the game - Spassky
• Crisis really means a turning point, a critical
moment when the stakes are high and the
outcome uncertain. It also implies a point of no
return. This signifies both danger and
opportunity…

26. In Summary
This book stresses the importance of wanting to
improve the way you do things
It is also important to understand why you are
doing what you are doing