13. What you always wanted to know about chess! Meet Pascal Mäser

Pascal Mäser is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute and the University of Basel. In addition of being a brilliant scientist and a great guitar player, he is also a very good chess player! With the recent success of the Netflix miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit”, chess sales have skyrocketed in the last few weeks. I used this opportunity to invite Pascal onto the show and ask him all my burning questions I had about chess!

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

To be a good chess player you do not need patience rather you need to be good at stress and crisis management.
There are different types of chess games depending on how much time is given to each player in total.
As a beginner progress can be made easily by learning a few key principles.
Maybe it does not need a special women’s chess federation but rather more encouragement for girls to start learning to play chess at a young age.
There are a few great movies and novels written about chess (see below in the links).
There are two types of chess players: The ones who play the opponent’s chess pieces and the ones who play the opponent!