“Survive. Just survive.”

Maurice Ashley couldn’t stress that enough to the defeated young man in front of him.

He’d carried that advice with him from his early childhood in Jamaica, to skirmishes in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and on through college. It had been just as true in each of those places as it was in this moment right now, consoling a child whom he had just squarely beat the pants off in chess.

It was lesson he didn’t mind teaching: he’d been that kid once.

After being defeated within a few minutes by one of the old masters in Prospect Park, well known for its revolving chess games, Maurice went to a local library, buried his head in chess books, and learned the game forwards and especially backwards.

“There are consequences to every single move you make in life,” he said.

And growing up in a rough part of Brooklyn, he knew it firsthand. Chess had kept him at home on Friday nights, learning strategies, building character and practicing with his friends instead of selling drugs or running with gangs like a lot of the other kids in his neighborhood did.

It certainly didn’t make him very popular, but it did put him on the path to the success that brought him full-circle.

After nearly 20 years of dedication to the craft, in 1999 Maurice Ashley became Grandmaster Maurice Ashley, the world’s very first black man to hold the chess title.

And then, he immediately went back to work in the community where it all started, founding the Harlem Chess Center just 6 months later to bring chess out of academic settings and into communities, bridging the gap between formal competition and street matches.

“People who think the game is slow and boring should come in here,” he said. ”Kids eat it. It takes nothing to get kids excited about chess. I put the pieces down, and the kids want to touch them — they’re alluring, tactile. The game is magic for kids.”

Since then, he’s channeled his competitive nature into sharing a love of chess with as many people as possible, starting with those with the least access.

In 2005, he wrote “Chess for Success” to share chess with beginners in a context that he’s always espoused: when you learn about chess, you learn about life. It’s full of lessons that “build determination, focus concentration, and teach you about yourself” but it also teaches players how to approach the world around them too.

In fact, being a chessmaster has already taken him places in the world no one would have anticipated a kid like him could go. In 2016, he was inducted into the Chess Hall of Fame for his combined professional success and efforts to bring more diverse groups of people everywhere into the game. In addition to his local grassroots work, he’s traveled the Caribbean teaching children how to play, built a critically acclaimed chess app, and he’s currently working with MIT Media Lab to integrate games like chess and their foundations into school curriculums to improve learning comprehension and application for all students.

In particular, Maurice wants to share a strategy that he uses to play, learn and live called “retrograde analysis.” Rather than teaching players to anticipate things out of their control, it teaches them to focus on the patterns, read their opponents’ previous moves, and force simple outcomes from complex, chaotic scenarios.

It’s a strategy that hasn’t just paid off for Maurice personally, or the people who are fortunate enough to learn from him, but motivates every move he makes today to benefit the kids who’ll lead our world tomorrow.

“When the kids see me walk in, they say, ‘Here’s a brother who looks like me and who is at the pinnacle of his field. I can do that, too.’ And when I see chess captivates their eyes as they’re trying to solve these complicated problems, that’s the most beautiful picture for our people to see.”

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