By Ray Keene OBE
International Chess Grandmaster
Patron Labour Asians Society
Sometimes the most important decisions in life arise from the most unexpected moments. In my case, the decision to abandon an academic path and make chess my professional career can be traced, remarkably, to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
In the early 1970s, I was at Cambridge University, pursuing postgraduate studies in German literature. My supervisor was the distinguished German scholar J. P. Stern of St John’s College. After watching Luchino Visconti’s celebrated film adaptation of Death in Venice, I expressed an interpretation with which my supervisor strongly disagreed.
Our exchange became heated. I left with one thought dominating my mind: if academic research meant writing what I was expected to think rather than examining the evidence and reaching my own conclusions, was this really the life for me?
That question changed everything.
I returned to my rooms and ultimately made a decision that would determine the course of my life. I left postgraduate study and committed myself to professional chess. Looking back more than half a century later, I have no regrets. I won the British Chess Championship, became the first English player to achieve a Grandmaster norm and subsequently gained the Grandmaster title. My career has taken me around the world as a player, writer, journalist and organiser. I have written more than 200 books and played a role in organising major international chess events, including World Championship contests.
Chess gave me something particularly precious: intellectual independence. On the chessboard, nobody can dictate what you must think. Every move has consequences. Your ideas are tested by an opponent who is actively trying to prove you wrong. Reputation, ideology and authority cannot rescue a bad move. You must analyse, question and decide for yourself. That principle has influenced my life beyond chess, including my involvement in politics. Over the decades my political affiliations have changed. I supported the Conservatives for many years, later joined Reform UK and subsequently moved to Labour. Those decisions reflected my own experiences and evolving political views. What has remained constant is my belief that organisations should encourage debate rather than demand unquestioning conformity.
Today, I am proud to serve as a Patron of the Labour Asians Society, where I have received a warm welcome and found opportunities to contribute to community engagement and public life. My political journey may have changed direction several times, but the lesson I learned at Cambridge has remained remarkably consistent: we should teach people how to think, not what to think. Chess became my career because it offered precisely that freedom, the freedom to question, calculate, challenge accepted wisdom and accept responsibility for one’s own decisions. More than 50 years later, after thousands of games, hundreds of publications and a lifetime devoted to the game, I remain grateful that I chose the chessboard.
Sometimes walking away from the path others expect you to follow is the first move towards discovering the path that truly belongs to you.
