This book explores twenty-first-century chess showing its unique pleasures and challenges, and advancing a new "anthropology of passion." Immersing us directly in chess's intricate culture, the author interweaves small dramas, closely observed details, illuminating insights, colorful anecdotes, and biographical sketches to elucidate the game and to reveal what goes on in the minds of experienced players when they face off over the board. It offers a take on the intrigues of chess and shows how themes of play, beauty, competition, addiction, fanciful cognition, and intersubjective engagement shape the lives of those who take up this most captivating of games.