The Dutch Grandmaster Paul van der Sterren was a professional chess player for over twenty years. At the peak of his career, he qualified for the Candidate Matches for the World Championship and was only four victories away from the World Title. In Mindful Chess, you will get his long and short answer to whether meditation or mindfulness will help your chess.
As a boy, Van der Sterren became fascinated by chess and became a gladiator at the chess board. To quote Theodore Roosevelt, he met with both victory and defeat, much joy and suffering. When, later in life, he discovered vipassana meditation, he met again with joy and suffering and approached these issues with the same total devotion as he had brought to chessthousands and thousands of hours on the cushion and studying Buddhist literature.
The reader will follow the two journeys through chess and meditation. And find answers to questions such as: What is chess? What is meditation? Who am I? What is I? Or will the answer elude you, is too much inexplainable and unknowable?
Paul van der Sterren (1956) was a professional chess player for over twenty years. At the peak of his career, the Dutch grandmaster qualified for the Candidate Matches for the World Championship and was only four victories away from the World Title. He is the bestselling author of Fundamental Chess Openings (Gambit Publishers). In 2023 New In Chess will publish his books: Mindful Chess and In Black and White - a spiritual and a chess autobiography.
007 Preface 009 Introduction Setting up the pieces 015 About chess 021 About mindfulness 030 About the unknowable The Opening 037 Getting hooked 043 Help! 050 Logic 054 Being in control 061 Nothing won, nothing lost 066 Nonduality, the black hole The Middlegame 071 Boredom and loneliness 078 Fear, come and guide me 083 The real cake 087 The power of concentration 099 Can we have quiet, please! 105 Chess is my life The Endgame 111 Facing the double-edged sword 115 The gateway to the unknown 119 The Afterlife 122 Epilogue 125 Recommended further reading 127 Acknowledgments
