I'm John Bastard. I am with Oliver Raider, his new book is Seven Games, a human history.

We turn to checkers because checkers always struck me as a young person easier than chess.

For example, all the pieces look the same so I could stack them up and all you do is get

to the back and something magical would happen, the back row. But turns out there is someone

we all need to remember when we played checkers. His name was Tinsley. He's gone now. He's

born in 1927. He left us in 1995. Who was he, Oliver?

Marion Tinsley was the best checkers player there's ever been. And indeed, I would argue the

best competitor at any competitive pursuit in the history of the world. Over, there was

a 40-year stretch of competitive checkers play where Tinsley played thousands of games

and lost exactly three times. So this was sort of his prowess at the checkers board. And

in real life, he was a minister and a math professor. And it was sort of checkers and his

Christian faith that sort of occupied his life and an equal measure, it seems. And insights

into the game of checkers would come to him out of the clear blue sky, he said, just

like his insights into scripture. So this is the man. And this man, Marion Tinsley caught

the attention of man and Jonathan Schaeffer, who was a computer scientist at the University

of Alberta, who got into his mind that he wanted to conquer the game of checkers. And he

wanted to beat the great Tinsley. And I don't want to spoil too much of my opening chapter,

but what ensues is this great, for the most part, friendly, epic heart breaking battle

between Marion Tinsley, the human checkers player and Jonathan Schaeffer, the human computer

programmer. And I would inject one thing into this story, which is oftentimes these battles are

built as man versus machine or human versus machine. But I'm careful to note that there's

really no such thing. I mean, there were humans that built these machines. So these human versus

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