All the Wrong Moves: A Memoir About Chess, Love, and Ruining Everything

Sasha Chapin is a victim of chess. Like countless amateurs before him--Albert Einstein, Humphrey Bogart, and Marcel Duchamp among them--the game has consumed his life and his mind. First captivated by it as a member of his high school chess club, he found his passion rekindled during an accidental encounter with chess hustlers on the streets of Kathmandu. In its aftermath, he forgot to care about anything else. Like a spurned lover, he tried to move on, but he found the game more seductive the more he resisted it.

And so, he reasons, if he can't defeat his addiction, he will try instead to master the game.

All the Wrong Moves traces Chapin's rollicking two-year journey around the globe in search of glory. He travels to tournaments in Bangkok and Hyderabad. He seeks out a mentor in St. Louis, a grandmaster whose personality is half rabbi and half monk, and who offers cryptic wisdom and caustic insults ("you're the best player in your chair.") His story builds toward the Los Angeles Open, where Chapin is clearly outmatched and yet determined not to lose.

Stylish, inventive, and laugh-out-loud funny, All the Wrong Moves is more than a work of history or autobiography. It is a chronicle of the highs and lows of obsession, of love pursued to its limits, and of a life driven by lust, terror, and the elusive possibility of victory.