This is John Batchelor. A happy conversation with Oliver Roder, his book Seven Games, a history of dice and baccarat.

But what we're looking at especially is checkers. Here I discuss the best Checkers player and Oliver

says perhaps the best gamer ever lived named Tinsley. He's no longer with

as he died in the 20th century.

Oliver Rotter explains why Tinsley was so good at Checkers. He concentrated and

something else.

Oliver wrote her on what he says is an introduction to the greatest gamer, checkers, whoever lived.

More of this later. Thank you.

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 in 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 this is the man. And this man, Marion Tinsley, caught the attention of a man

named Jonathan Schaefer, 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, heartbreaking battle between Marion Tinsley, the human checkers player and Jonathan

Schaefer, 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, you know,

that there is really no such thing.

...