Finance and Chess: checkmate.

The benefits of Chess are multiple and well-known; among others, it improves thinking and problem-solving skills, as well as reinforcing planning and forecasting abilities. We can say that playing chess requires resilience, tenacity, and a great deal of resilience. This strategic management, which requires a great ability to make decisions under pressure, quickness, and logical thinking, has a great parallelism with strategy in finance or business. Several entrepreneurs and finance experts stand out for applying what they have learned on the board with their experience in the business world.

Among them we can highlight:

- Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is a great player who emphasizes the importance of staying calm when making mistakes and how chess helps to face stressful situations where you have to stay calm. And no less important is understanding what others think, why my opponent does what he does. Kenneth confesses to having used game theory, learned by him naturally in part through the teachings of chess, when solving problems.

- Alan Trefler, chairman of the business computer engineering group Pegasystems. Alan confesses to being a player since he was seven years old; according to him, business processes are very similar to chess. "First, you look at the board, absorb the data, recognize the patterns, analyze, develop a strategy, and then continuously review and develop that strategy as the game progresses." In fact, Alan developed a program that allows companies to experience and adjust processes with experience thanks to software that revolves around continuous reevaluation, reminiscent of a chess player's strategy.

- John Harsanyi, Nobel Prize winner in Economics in 1994, in his theory of "strategic interaction," laid the foundations of information economics, focusing on situations where there is no certainty and where agents are unaware of the objectives of their competitors, thus demonstrating the usefulness of games, including chess, as a model for more complex interactions.

- Other examples would be Ron Henley, consultant for major Wall Street companies, or Barron Hilton, American businessman and co-chairman of the Hilton hotel chain.

In our country, the initiative stands out on the part of the economic and finance information portal, The Restless Investor, led by María Jesús Soto, author of "My First Book of Economics," which has the support of the Ciudad León Master Chess Tournament. María Jesús, together with Marcelino Sión, have sponsored the official presentation of the Eighth edition of the Chess and Finance Contest with a view to developing synergies between both disciplines.

For this contest, which we find very interesting, four concepts are chosen: objectivity, prudence, initiative, and patience. As explained in its rules, work will be done on:

January- initiative: Ability to anticipate events and energetically seize any opportunity that arises.

February- prudence: Ability that allows for the prevention and anticipation of future risks.

March- objectivity: Ability to adequately assess any reality without emotions distorting it.

April- patience: Ability to know how to wait for the right moment.

We can say that a chess enthusiast working on these qualities will find it easier to increase their financial literacy due to their synergies because ultimately both share the same starting point: decision-making.

There are many situations that arise in daily life, especially in such volatile circumstances as the current one. Like a chessboard, you have to develop the best strategy to face them, weighing all the alternatives in constant adaptation. 2020 has been an exceptionally complex year where a virus put the world in check; hopefully, 2021 will be the year when the world checkmates the virus with a checkmate.