Maurice Ashley holds a title shared by only 59 other U.S. chess players: International Grand Master. Watch him work a room of kids and you will quickly see the qualities that make him an even rarer individual: patience, respect, concern, empathy. He is a master teacher of life's great lessons.

Chess taught him the secrets to success. Now, with the publication of his first book, Chess for Success, he wants to pass them on to children and parents.

"Chess is not a panacea. It never will be," he says. "Chess, for me, is more like a spark. Chess has the ability to light a fire in a child's imagination. Once you do that, you have the most powerful force in the world."

Unlike a Garry Kasparov or a Bobby Fischer, whose obligations to society stopped at the edge of the chessboard, Ashley has a double calling. As the world's first and only African-American to achieve the IGM rank, he feels an internal pressure to maintain his global chess rating and reputation. Far more important, he is a role model accountable to a generation of kids. His autograph--at least among those who know chess--is as coveted as a Peyton Manning or a Michael Jordan.

This is why he spends so much time teaching, in his backyard and across the country. When Ashley connects with a youngster, it is about so much more than the 64 squares between them. To steal a metaphor from a different game, it is about making the most of the hand one is dealt.

When Ashley says chess changed his life, it's no exaggeration. As a child and young teen, Ashley experienced the poverty and brokenness that characterize the lives of so many of the students he now hopes to reach.

Ashley was two when his single mother left him and his siblings with their grandmother in Jamaica to seek out something better in the United States. Ten years later, after Thelma Cormack had worked her way up from live-in nanny to clerical worker, she obtained visas and summoned the children from St. Andrew to New York.

Ashley, imagining the mansions he had seen on TV, was stunned when he arrived at the apartment his mother had worked so hard to afford. "I was confused by the sights: garbage on the streets, shops smeared with graffiti, gaping potholes in the roads. Abandoned buildings with smashed windows resembling a skull's empty eye sockets seemed to haunt every other corner." His new home in the Land of Promise? A two-story tenement that his brother compared to a jailhouse.

If Ashley was disappointed by the poverty of his daily existence, he was dismayed by the lack of opportunity at school. A seventh grader who tested at a 12th-grade reading level, Ashley quickly became bored by the "white noise" coming from the front of the classroom. His math assignments resembled what he had done in Jamaica in fifth grade. "That a poor country like Jamaica could be that far ahead of the United States in teaching its young was baffling to me then, disgraceful to me now."

Ashley spent his days dodging stray bullets and engaging in mostly innocuous pranks, but over time he felt his drive and motivation slipping. "School often felt like a holding cell instead of the haven for learning and personal development that it's supposed to be."

By the time Ashley entered the 4,000-student Brooklyn Technical High School, he was too disenchanted to take advantage of its more challenging curriculum. Ashley failed to make the football or baseball teams. His daily routine bored him: wake up, go to school, come home, do homework, hang out with friends, go to bed. Nothing seemed to matter.

Then, while researching a class project one day in the library, a book on a reference shelf miraculously caught Ashley's eye. On the cover, the word CHESS appeared in faded block letters. Its yellowing pages were filled with curious diagrams and symbols that looked to Ashley like military battle plans. It was a life-changing glance. In no time, the scholarly instincts Ashley had suppressed returned. He became consumed with reading, learning and practicing forks, pins and checkmates. Friday nights, once spent aimlessly hanging out on the street, became all-night chess marathons.

In Ashley's case, chess lit a fire under an incredible mind that had gone untapped. As his subsequent investigations confirmed, its benefits were equally compelling for those with lesser cognitive skills. Although most school officials are unaware of it, a substantial body of research proves that chess enhances problem solving and comprehension. In 1984, the International Chess Federation reported on a Venezuela study of second graders that showed IQ increases in both male and female chess players and across all socioeconomic levels. Chess players significantly outstrip peers in emotional intelligence tests, displaying higher levels of self-confidence, respect, frustration tolerance and persistence. Chess improves social performance, even impacting school suspension and expulsion rates.

By 1986, just a few years after picking up the tattered chess book, a 20-year-old Ashley had earned the rank of national master. "The game shaped who I was, bringing direction, purpose, quality and depth to a life full of uncertainty," Ashley writes in Chess for Success. "Did the game save my life? Those words may be too strong. But chess so informed and influenced everything about my life that I can say, without exaggeration, that I would not be the person I am today had it not been for this ancient game."

If not for Ashley, students at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. High School in Central Harlem would not be who they are today, either. Ashley was the chess coach who led the school's Raging Rooks to a first place tie at the National Junior High School Chess Championships in 1991.

Ashley was a struggling student at City College of New York when the American Chess Foundation approached him about a part-time job. The foundation wanted to expand a program to teach chess in inner-city schools. Ashley, needing "a few extra bucks," jumped at the chance and soon found himself in some of the toughest schools in Harlem and the South Bronx.

No matter how poor the school or hardened the students, Ashley quickly discovered that young people were eager to play and to improve. "Teachers would come to me in wide-eyed amazement, wondering how I was getting their classes so wired up about learning. I would get special pleasure out of getting 'problem' kids who were incredibly disruptive in their regular classes to sit still and focus when it came time for chess."

Chess has long been a preferred pastime in poor neighborhoods, presumably because it can be played anywhere, anytime, at virtually no cost. As Ashley worked with young students, he started to see other life lessons.

"What you didn't know could get you checkmated. This was applicable knowledge. You learn a new move or idea and ten minutes later, you use it to beat your friend or fend off his attack." Perhaps more significant, chess fit right into the tough, survival-oriented lifestyles of these young people. Although students were disconnected from textbook learning, the chessboard replicated their lives. "They didn't need for me to preach to them; they knew people ... who were suffering the consequences of wrong moves, poor choices, and bad decisions. Chess had immediacy to it. 'You mess up, you lose, son.'"

Far more than a conduit for aggression, chess taught the kids that bad moves did not always lead to defeat. It revealed potential for growth. It offered the chance to analyze errors and try again. It conveyed a powerful message rarely heard on the streets: If you keep your cool, you can overcome an overconfident adversary.

After leading the Raging Rooks to a national championship, Ashley worked similar magic three blocks away at Mott Hall Middle School. Philanthropist Dan Rose sponsored the program through his Harlem Educational Activities Fund, which provided scholarly activities to enrich the lives of disadvantaged families in Central Harlem and Washington Heights.

The Dark Knights won back-to-back national junior varsity championships in 1994 and 1995. Along the way, Ashley married, started a family, became a TV commentator, and designed his own best-selling CD-ROM, Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess.

Despite the sweetness of victory and national headlines, Ashley was troubled by a gnawing sense of unfulfilled purpose. In 1997, he took a break from what had become a full-time coaching job to pursue his playing career, more specifically his dream of becoming International Grand Master.

Credit the golfer Tiger Woods.

"He had won many amateur tournaments, but it was his historic win in April of 1997 at the Masters, by an unheard-of 12 strokes, that captivated my imagination," Ashley says. "Tiger's win at Augusta served as a wake-up call. It made me realize the need to make some serious changes in my life if I was going to get to where I wanted to be. I decided there and then that nothing else mattered, that I needed to prioritize my life if I was ever going to accomplish my goal."

After just two years of rigorous study, Ashley joined an elite group of world-class chess masters that includes such giants as Anatoly Karpov, Emanuel Lasker, and his own role model, Paul Morphy.

In 2001, Ashley became the only back-to-back winner in the history of the prestigious Foxwoods Open. In 2002, he became the first African-American in 157 years to qualify for the U.S. Championship. In 2003, the U.S. Chess Federation named Ashley Grand Master of the Year. In May 2005, his latest venture, Generation Chess, organized in Minneapolis the largest open chess tournament in history, with a half-million-dollar purse.

Of all these things, Ashley is intensely proud, but they have become a means to an end: helping kids succeed. Within weeks of the Minneapolis event, Ashley appeared at an inner-city chess camp in Indianapolis, Indiana, to work one-on-one with children. His quiet demeanor, engaging smile, and proclivity for sports metaphors captured their imaginations, as it has for thousands of youngsters he has met since his days with the Raging Rooks. No headlines accompanied this visit, sponsored by a community center for which Ashley discounted his appearance fee.

The actor Will Smith, who met Ashley in 2000 when his wife treated him to a chess lesson as a Valentine's gift, says that Ashley offers "a great message of hope--that chess can be one piece of the puzzle to help our young people shine."

The puzzle, however, is incomplete. Ashley, who turns 40 in March, remains drawn to unfinished business. Perhaps it's because he wants for all children the same kind of success that he has enjoyed.

His latest dream? "To see chess in every school in America." It's a goal that will take a lot of money and even more persuasion--of parents, school boards, teachers and the educational establishment. He wrote Chess for Success, in part, so that stakeholders in the educational system would better understand the ways chess can help kids overcome life obstacles.

As he told a young chess camper in Indianapolis, being an International Grand Master is a big, big deal. "Most kids never get to play with one," he pointed out with a grin. But it isn't enough for a purpose-filled life, not by a long shot.

In Chess for Success, International Grand Master Maurice Ashley shares four life lessons that he says come straight from the chessboard.

1. Embrace chaos

"Many people assume that when something crazy happens, they will just handle it. Unfortunately, when the situation begins to spiral out of control, they realize that they are completely unprepared to deal with it. It's incredibly useful to develop a set of responses to crazy situations beforehand, whether it be a fire, a criminal act, or an aggressive driver cutting you off in traffic. Not everything can be anticipated precisely, nor does it need to be. Just training oneself to get into the right frame of mind can be of huge benefit when the moment calls for it."

2. Use aggression to your advantage, but don't force things.

"My chess game changed dramatically when I stopped forcing things. Before, I was afraid that if I let the opponent attack, I might be crushed myself. I soon realized the opposite. By allowing an attack, I could use the energy projected at me to make my counterattack even stronger. The popular martial arts of tai chi and aikido are built on this principle."

3. Get good to really appreciate greatness in others.

"One of the benefits of being a grand master is that it allows me to really appreciate how hard it is to be good at anything. The field may vary: sports, entertainment, law, medicine, farming, pottery. Whatever the endeavor, the top performers are those willing to invest in the hard work, dedication, sacrifices, and long hours of study and practice that separate them from the rest."

4. To get better, become like a child.

"Professionals of all stripes often become jaded; winning often dominates learning and growing. I've seen it many times in the eyes of my colleagues; when you know too much, the thrill and amazement felt in the early stages just don't occur as frequently.... When I need a shot of awe, I go play with my son, Jaden. At two, the whole planet is a mystery to him ... I often leave the chessboard alone for weeks. When I return, the pieces look like alien artifacts. I feel a twinge of excitement, as if I'm about to flirt with a beautiful stranger."

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