Perpetual Chess Podcast

Oliver Roeder is an author, and a former senior writer for FiveThirtyEight.com who has often covered chess and other games. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin, with an emphasis on game theory, and  studied Artifical Intelligence at Harvard University as a Niemann fellow. Today he appears with a new book, Seven Games, a Human History. It covers the history and current competitive contexts of the games Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Go. Poker, Scrabble, and Bridge. Oliver’s book gave us an opportunity to talk about why people love games, why people love chess, and his own relationship with the game. Given Oliver’s expertise in A.I., we also discussed how it is changing all of these games. It was lots of fun to get a “big picture” view of chess’ enduring popularity from Oliver, and I highly recommend his book. Links, more details, and timestamps below!  0:00- Why do people love games, and especially chess?  5:00- We discuss Oliver’s background with the other games in the book: