AUTHOR: Peter Anthony TITLE: Great lessons from the chess board DATE: 11/02/2006 ----- BODY:

It's hard to find a better example of competition than chess. After just three opening moves by a chess player more than 9 million positions are possible from the 32 pieces on 64 squares. Gary Kasparov was world chess champion for a decade from 1984 when he won the title as a 22 year old. He was interviewed recently by Harvard Business Review and he said some very interesting things such as the following. "Often, your gut will serve you better than your brains. I've studied the playing histories of the great players of the past 200 years. I found something very interesting. It was often at the very toughest moments of their chess battles - when they had to rely on pure intuition - that these great players came up with their best, most innovative moves. Ironically, when the games were finished and the players had the luxury of replaying them at leisure they typically made more mistakes than when they were competing. To me the implication is clear: What made these players great was not their analytic prowess but their intuition under pressure." "I call it the champions dilemma, and it’s a real problem for people at the top of their game - where does a virtuoso go after he has accomplished everything? In the end I believe that there is only one answer: you must be lucky in your choice of enemies. For me it was Karpov. For the first five years of my championship I had to prove every year that I was the best. I see new enemies nipping at my heels. And every day I am grateful to them because they push me to be passionate about staying on top. Without Bill Gates Steve Jobs would not be the CEO he is today. If Karpov had not existed you may not be talking to me today." "Bobby Fisher could beat the IBM computer Big Blue because he could focus on the 10% of moves that had biggest strategic impact, while the computer looked at an infinite number of possible moves."

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