Can chess really teach you how to be successful in life and money?

Since Susan Polgar and I first met when she was a guest on my radio show (click here to hear the interview) we have been amazed at how many parallels we have found between the worlds of chess and investing.

When Garry Kasparov wrote his book about how chess imitates life, he noted certain aspects of the royal game pop up throughout his business career. What Susan and I discovered, however, was the breadth of this truth. Every conversation that we had, we realized that some strategy, even the highest level strategies that she was teaching to her prize-winning students, had an application that made sense in the world of investing.

This went much further than what a lot of people said when we told him about our idea for the book. Folks would comment, “What a great idea for a book. Grandmasters always think many steps ahead.”

First of all, that’s not always true. And second of all, the fact that a person can think many steps ahead does not necessarily help him to make either investment or chess decisions because once you begin to think out a few moves, the number of possibilities grows exponentially.

Rather, what we began to flush out was much more about designing strategies that could be applied in multiple situations and can be flexible enough to deal with the oncoming attacks that are so common both on the 64 squares and on Wall Street.