Is Life and Work Like a Big Game of Chess?

Chess is fascinating. I always tell people it reminds me of real life in the way of developing a strategy, reading your competition and thinking several steps ahead of them, and of course battling it out for that final checkmate. Chess is believed to have originated around 600 AD in what is now Afghanistan or India and indeed was much based on warfare where what we today call the pawn, knight, bishop, and rook represented the four divisions of the military: infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry.

The pieces of the the game (pawn, knight, bishop, rook, queen, king) also remind me of people with different levels of influence and power in an environment such as a corporation or country. For example, at a large corporation, a Financial Analyst (pawn) will have much less flexibility and control of what he/she can do to incorporate change to compete with other companies than say the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the company (Queen).

In my analogy, the pieces of the chess game would be the employees and the opponents playing chess would be the companies. However, even within the same team, although the pieces (employees) have to work together to win, there is usually competition between employees themselves to advance within the organization (Pawn promotion).

Below is a video recreation of the chess moves played in the famous Chess game battle royale between Robert Fischer and Mikhail Tal in the 1962 Candidates Tournament in Curacao. At this time Bobby Fischer was 18 and Mikhail Tal, recognized as one of the greatest chess players in the world, was 26. Bobby Fischer plays the white pieces and Mikhail Tal plays the black pieces.

The game starts with the Sicilian Defense. What fascinates me about this game is that Tal seems to develop his pieces more quickly at the start, and at one point you can see all of Fischer’s non-pawn pieces are still in the back row with the exception of the king-side horse which has been captured. At this point, you may think Fischer is more likely to lose, yet he strategically wins with some impressively aggressive moves similar to the opening. Tal cedes on the 29th move.