PROTECT THE KING

 

CATEGORY

Life, Strategy & the Battles of the Mind

PRIMARY EMOTION

Determination

 

ALSO FITS

Challenge
Confidence
Strategy
Discipline
Patience
Competition
Sacrifice
Mental Strength
Consequences
Resilience
Victory

 

WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT

PROTECT THE KING is a chess song, but I didn’t want to write a song that simply tells people how chess pieces move around a board.

I wanted the board to feel alive.

Two people sit across from each other. Between them are 64 squares and 32 pieces. Nobody is rolling dice. Nobody is waiting for a lucky card. Once that game begins, your decisions belong to you.

That is what interested me.

You make a move. Your opponent answers.

You build a trap. Maybe they see it.

You sacrifice a piece. Maybe they think you made a mistake.

You attack one side of the board while your real plan is developing somewhere else.

Sometimes the move that looks strongest is the wrong move. Sometimes the piece that looks unimportant becomes dangerous later. Sometimes you have to give something up now because you can see what it will give you five moves from now.

That is chess.

It also sounds a lot like life.

The title gives away the one responsibility that never changes:

Protect the king.

You can lose pawns.

You can lose a knight.

You can lose a bishop.

You can lose a rook.

You can even lose your queen and continue fighting.

But when your king has nowhere left to go, the game is finished.

That simple rule gave me the backbone of the song.

I wanted to take the listener through the board piece by piece while still making it feel like a confrontation between two people trying to get inside each other’s heads.

By the time we reach Checkmate, the song isn’t only about how the pieces move.

It is about how decisions move.

 

THE STORY BEHIND PROTECT THE KING

Chess became part of my life during incarceration.

When people picture incarceration, they may think first about cells, doors, guards, concrete and time. Those things are certainly there. But when you have that much time around you, you also find ways to keep your mind occupied.

Chess can do that.

A chessboard doesn’t need electricity. It doesn’t need much space. It doesn’t care who you are, where you came from, how much money you have or what you did before you sat down.

Once the pieces are set up, both players begin with the same army.

That is one of the things I like about it.

There are 16 pieces on your side and 16 on mine.

You choose black or white.

Then make your move.

I have always enjoyed things that make me think. I like figuring things out. I like understanding how something works and then looking for another way to use it. Chess fits naturally into that part of me because the obvious move is not always the best move.

You are not only looking at the board as it exists right now.

You are trying to see the board that might exist three moves from now.

That is why the opening of this song comes at you almost like a challenge:

“Be the Man U always wanted to be
Wanna challenge me then take ur seat”

There is something wonderfully simple about that.

Sit down.

Pick your side.

No excuses.

Let’s see what happens.

The battle takes place inside those 64 squares, but a good chess game is also happening in two minds.

I’m watching what you do.

You’re watching what I do.

I might make you believe I want one square when I’m really interested in another. I might offer you something because I want you to take it. You might do exactly the same thing to me.

That is why I wrote:

“Set ur trap make me believe
U see what I cannot see”

That is the part of chess I wanted the song to capture.

Not just movement.

Thought.

 

WHY I WROTE THIS SONG

I wanted to write something powerful about a game I respect.

I also wanted to have some fun with it.

There are plenty of serious subjects throughout MOITA. Life gives us enough of those. Every song doesn’t have to carry grief, anger or some enormous personal event.

Sometimes a subject is worth writing about because it fascinates you.

Chess fascinates me because every piece has limitations, but those limitations create possibilities.

A pawn looks weak.

A knight moves strangely.

A bishop can never leave its colour.

A rook needs open roads.

The queen seems capable of almost anything.

The king, the most important piece on the board, moves only one square at a time.

Put those limitations together and suddenly you have millions of possibilities.

That gave me a lot to play with as a songwriter.

I could make the pawns soldiers.

I could make the rooks castle walls.

I could let the bishops cut across the board.

I could let the knights come jumping into places you didn’t expect.

And then there was the queen.

I had to have some fun with her.

“Wait till U meet my queen
She owns every line between
Straight or diagonal fast & clean
She’s a wrecking machine”

That gave the song some personality.

I didn’t want this to sound like somebody reading instructions from a chess manual. I wanted somebody who understands chess to recognize the game, while somebody who barely knows chess could still follow the battle.

Most of all, I wanted the listener to feel two minds going against each other.

 

WHY THIS MATTERS TO ME

There is another reason chess stays interesting to me.

It rewards thinking.

You can be aggressive, but aggression without thought can destroy your own position.

You can be defensive, but if all you ever do is defend, eventually somebody may squeeze the board around you.

You need patience.

You need timing.

You need awareness.

You need to understand that sometimes losing something is part of gaining something bigger.

That idea appears directly in the song:

“Sometimes U lose to pull them in
Sometimes losing is how U win”

I like that line because it leaves the chessboard without actually leaving it.

There have been plenty of times in life when something looked like a loss while it was happening. Sometimes it really was a loss. Other times it forced a change, taught a lesson or opened a different road.

Chess doesn’t promise that every sacrifice will work.

Neither does life.

A bad sacrifice is still a bad sacrifice.

The lesson is not to throw things away and hope for the best.

The lesson is to understand why you are making the move.

That matters to me.

 

WHY THIS SONG FITS MOITA

MOITA was never supposed to be trapped inside one subject.

I can write about something painful one day and something historical the next. I can write about family, incarceration, humour, human behaviour, technology, love, mistakes, questions, or a chessboard.

What connects those songs is the thinking behind them.

PROTECT THE KING belongs in MOITA because a chessboard gives us another way to talk about choices.

Every piece matters differently.

Every move changes what becomes possible next.

A mistake has consequences.

Patience has value.

Sacrifice can have purpose.

Power without position can become useless.

And the smallest piece on the board can cross the entire battlefield and become something much more powerful than it was when it started.

There is a lot of life hiding inside 64 squares.

That is exactly the kind of subject I want inside the MOITA Library.

 

READ THIS FIRST

Before you read the lyrics, picture the board.

Not as a quiet board sitting on a table.

Picture it as a battlefield.

Sixteen pieces are waiting on your side.

Sixteen are waiting on mine.

Your pawns are in front.

Your major pieces are behind them.

Your king is somewhere in that formation, depending on how far the game has developed.

Across from you is another person trying to think ahead of you.

There is no dice roll coming to rescue either one of us.

The board doesn’t care what we intended to do.

It only knows the move we actually made.

Now take your seat.

Black or white.

Pick your side.

And whatever happens next

Protect the king.

 

FULL LYRICS 

PROTECT THE KING

 

Be the man you always wanted to be
Wanna challenge me? Then take your seat
Black or white, you pick your side
64 squares, nowhere to hide
32 pieces, face to face
Every move, a fight for space
I’m your opponent, make your move
One wrong square and you could lose

 Sit down, see if you can mess with my mind
Think 3 moves ahead or fall behind
Set your trap, make me believe
You see what I cannot see
This is my board, I know this game
Every square is calling my name
Wait till you meet my queen
She owns every line between
Straight or diagonal, fast and clean
She’s a wrecking machine

Protect the king
Protect the king
Every piece will fight and fall
Protect the king
At the end of it all
Protect the king

 My pawns are soldiers, first in line
One step forward, taking their time
Strike diagonal, left or right
Sacrifice to control the fight
Never turn back, never retreat
Cross the board, promotion waits
Ignore that pawn, let it pass
It could come back a queen at last

My knights ride with an L-shaped attack
Two then one, and they don’t look back
Jump right over anything there
You never know where they’ll appear
Fork your king, put your queen in sight
One crooked move can change the fight

My bishops cut diagonal lines
One on the dark, one on the light
Corner to corner, they watch their lane
Open an angle and feel the pain

My rooks stand strong like castle walls
Up and down, across it all
Rank and file, they own the road
Clear their path and watch them go

Then comes my queen
Every man’s dream
Straight or diagonal, fast and clean
Side to side, wherever she needs
Protecting her king while taking your team
She strikes anywhere she can see
She’s a wrecking machine

Protect the king
Protect the king
Every piece will fight and fall
Protect the king
At the end of it all
Protect the king

Don’t forget who this war is for
The king moves one square, nothing more
Forward, backward, side to side
Diagonal too, nowhere safe to hide
He may be limited, he may move slow
Lose your king and the whole game goes

Castle him early, rook by his side
Two pieces move and the king can hide
Build a fortress, guard every square
One careless move and check is there

This is my kingdom, I’m making my claim
There ain’t no dice in a thinking man’s game
Every move has reason, every piece a place
Every square I control takes your space
Trade a pawn, sacrifice a knight
Give up a rook if the timing is right
Sometimes you lose to pull them in
Sometimes losing is how you win

Sit down, try to mess with my mind
You’ve looked ahead, but you’re out of time
You set your traps, you tried your tricks
I’ve built this since move number six
Look at your board, see what remains
Your king has nowhere to escape
My rook owns the file, my bishop the lane
My knight took the square you thought was safe
My queen moves in

Check

Look again
No square left
No piece can defend
No place to run
This is the end

Checkmate

64 squares
32 came
One king standing
That’s the game

Protect the king
Protect the king
Every piece will fight and fall
Protect the king
At the end of it all
Protect the king

SECTION ONE

LYRIC JOURNEY

PART 1

Be the Man U always wanted to be
Wanna challenge me then take ur seat

That’s where I wanted this song to begin. Not with an explanation of chess and not with somebody teaching you the rules. I wanted it to begin with a challenge.

Sit down across from me.

If you think you can beat me, here’s the chair.

There is something about chess that I have always liked because once the game starts, all the talking in the world doesn’t help you. You can tell me how good you are. You can tell me how many people you’ve beaten. You can try to get inside my head before the first piece moves. Eventually you have to sit down and prove it on the board.

That first line, Be the Man U always wanted to be, is bigger than chess for me. A challenge has a way of revealing people. It is easy to imagine the person we want to be when nothing is testing us. It’s different when somebody is sitting across from you waiting to see what you’re actually going to do.

Chess gives you that test in a very controlled way.

Nobody has to get hurt.

Nobody has to scream.

Nobody has to threaten anybody.

We sit down and think.

That’s the fight.

Black or white U pick ur side
64 squares nowhere to hide

Now the board appears.

You have two sides to choose from, black or white, and once the pieces are set, the battlefield is exactly the same size for both of us.

Sixty-four squares.

That’s all we get.

I like that limitation because it makes the possibilities inside chess even more interesting. The board never becomes larger because you’re in trouble. You don’t get another ten squares because you made a mistake. There is nowhere outside the board where you can hide a piece until you need it later.

Everything happens right there in front of both players.

When I wrote nowhere to hide, I wasn’t saying there is literally nowhere a king can find safety. Of course there are safer and more dangerous positions on a chessboard. What I liked was the feeling behind the words.

Your decisions are visible.

If you move something, I see it.

If you leave something open, I can see that too, if I’m paying attention.

The board doesn’t hide what happened.

People can make excuses after a game, but the pieces usually tell the story.

32 pieces face to face
Every move a fight for space

Thirty-two pieces begin the game.

Sixteen on my side.

Sixteen on yours.

At the beginning, everything looks organized. Two armies facing each other. Nobody has lost anything yet. Nobody has broken through. Nobody has been checkmated.

Then somebody makes the first move.

From that moment forward, the position begins changing.

Every move a fight for space is important because chess isn’t only about capturing pieces. When I was writing the song, I didn’t want every battle to sound like take this piece, take that piece, take another piece.

Sometimes the battle is for a square.

Sometimes it’s for a file.

Sometimes it’s for a diagonal.

Sometimes you move a piece because you want to stop me from putting one of mine somewhere useful.

That is where chess becomes much more interesting than simply counting what has been captured.

You can have pieces on the board and still feel squeezed.

You can have plenty of material and not have enough room to use it properly.

Space creates possibilities.

I’m ur opponent make ur move
One wrong square & U could lose

Now I’m talking directly to the person across from me.

I’m your opponent.

Make your move.

I wanted that confidence in the song because chess has a certain kind of pressure to it. Once your hand leaves that piece, the decision is made.

One wrong square can matter.

That doesn’t mean every bad move automatically loses the game. We all make moves that aren’t perfect. Sometimes you make a mistake and recover. Sometimes your opponent doesn’t even notice it.

But sometimes one square really does change everything.

Maybe you put your queen somewhere she can be trapped.

Maybe you move a pawn and expose your king.

Maybe you leave a piece undefended.

Maybe you move the one piece that was protecting something you didn’t realize was about to become important.

The mistake can look small when you make it.

The consequence can arrive later.

That is one of the reasons chess makes you think differently. You can’t only ask what this move does for you right now. You have to ask what changes because of it.

What did I open?

What did I close?

What did I stop protecting?

What did I allow you to do?

Those are chess questions, but I don’t think they belong only to chess.

I’ve lived enough life to know that one decision can sometimes look harmless when you’re making it. The real cost doesn’t always arrive immediately.

That doesn’t mean we should become afraid to make decisions.

It means we should learn to think about them.

Sit down see if U can mess with my mind
Think 3 moves ahead or fall behind

Now the physical game starts becoming a mental one.

This is the part of chess that interests me the most.

You’re not only moving your pieces.

You’re trying to understand what I’m thinking.

I’m doing the same thing to you.

Think 3 moves ahead isn’t meant to say that every chess player should calculate exactly three moves and stop. Strong players may calculate much deeper in certain positions, while other moves may depend more on experience, pattern recognition or strategy.

For the song, three moves gives the listener the idea immediately.

Don’t only think about now.

If I move here and you answer there, what happens next?

Then what?

That’s the habit I wanted inside those words.

It is very easy in life to think only about the first result.

I want this, so I’ll do that.

Fine.

What happens after you get it?

What does your decision create?

Who else is affected?

What happens if the other person doesn’t react the way you expected?

What is your next move?

Thinking ahead doesn’t mean you can predict everything. Nobody can.

It means you respect consequences enough to consider them before they arrive.

Set ur trap make me believe
U see what I cannot see

This is where the game between the two minds gets even better.

A good trap doesn’t usually announce itself.

If I know exactly what you’re trying to do, I’m probably not walking into it.

You want me to believe something.

Maybe you leave a pawn where I can take it.

I look at it and think you’ve made a mistake.

Free pawn.

Thank you very much.

But why did you leave it there?

That’s the question.

Maybe taking it pulls my piece away from an important square.

Maybe it opens a line toward my king.

Maybe you’re giving me something small because you’re preparing to take something bigger.

The trap works because I participate in it.

That’s what I like about those two lines.

Set ur trap make me believe.

You need me to believe the move is mine.

That idea can travel a long way outside a chessboard.

People get pulled into arguments that way.

People get pulled into bad deals that way.

People get manipulated that way.

Something is presented in a way that makes us want to react immediately.

Sometimes the smartest thing we can do is ask one more question before reaching for it.

Why is this being offered to me?

On the chessboard, that extra question can save your queen.

Outside the chessboard, sometimes it can save you from something much bigger.

Then I come right back to the game.

This is my board I know this game
Every square is calling my name

Now the confidence rises.

This is my territory.

I know what these pieces can do.

I know what I’m looking for.

Every square is calling my name isn’t meant literally. It is the feeling of sitting at a board when you’re completely engaged in the position.

You aren’t looking at sixty-four separate little boxes anymore.

You start seeing relationships.

This square controls that one.

That knight could go there.

That bishop would become dangerous if this pawn moved.

That rook needs an open file.

That queen is watching something from the other side of the board.

The more you understand chess, the less the board looks like a collection of individual pieces.

It starts looking like a system.

Everything affects something else.

That is when the game gets interesting.

And that is exactly when I wanted to bring in the piece everybody notices.

Wait till U meet my queen
She owns every line between
Straight or diagonal fast & clean
She’s a wrecking machine

I had fun writing the queen.

I wanted her to have an entrance.

She is the most powerful piece on the board in terms of movement, so I didn’t want her quietly slipping into the song like she was just another piece.

She needed attitude.

She needed power.

She needed to sound dangerous.

The queen can move along ranks, files and diagonals as long as her path is clear. That gives her enormous reach.

So I turned her into a character.

She’s a wrecking machine.

There is some humour in that line too. I wasn’t trying to make PROTECT THE KING sound like a chess lesson somebody would fall asleep reading. This is still a song. It should have personality.

But there is something interesting about introducing the queen this way.

I have just made her sound like the star of the entire board.

She owns the lines.

She’s fast.

She’s clean.

She’s powerful.

She’s the wrecking machine.

Then the song immediately reminds us that even she isn’t what the game is ultimately about.

Protect the king
Protect the king
Every piece will fight & fall
Protect the king
At the & of it all
Protect the king

This is where the whole song finds its centre.

I can spend all day telling you how dangerous my queen is.

It doesn’t change the objective.

Protect the king.

That’s what I love about chess.

The most powerful piece and the most important piece are not the same thing.

The queen has far greater freedom of movement than the king.

But lose your queen and the game can continue.

Let your king become checkmated and the game is finished.

Every piece will fight & fall gives the chorus its battlefield feeling, but underneath that is the actual structure of chess. Pieces are exchanged. Pawns disappear. A knight may be sacrificed. A rook may be traded. A queen may even be lost.

The king remains the responsibility everything else is built around.

There is a larger idea sitting inside that.

Power gets attention.

Importance isn’t always as obvious.

That happens in life too.

We can spend enormous energy protecting things that look powerful, impressive or valuable while neglecting something quieter that actually matters more.

Money can be replaced.

Possessions can be replaced.

Some opportunities come around again.

Other things are much harder to recover once they’re gone.

Trust.

Time.

Certain relationships.

Your name.

Your principles.

Your peace of mind.

Everybody’s answer will be different, and I don’t want to tell somebody else what their king has to be.

I only think it’s worth knowing what yours is.

Because if you don’t know what you’re protecting, you can win a lot of little battles and still lose something that mattered more.

At the & of it all, the song gives you the instruction again.

Protect the king.

My pawns are soldiers first in line
1 step forward taking their time

Now that the purpose of the battle has been established, we start meeting the army properly.

The pawns come first.

I called them soldiers because visually and strategically it made sense to me. They begin across the front line, eight of them standing between the major pieces and the other side of the board.

Compared with the queen, they don’t look impressive.

One step forward.

Taking their time.

But pawns are important because they help shape the position from the beginning.

They claim space.

They support pieces.

They restrict pieces.

They can open lines.

They can close lines.

And unlike most of the other pieces, once a pawn advances, it doesn’t simply turn around and go back.

That makes a pawn move a commitment.

I like that.

The smallest-looking decisions can become some of the decisions you have to live with for the longest time.

Strike diagonal left or right
Sacrifice to control the fight

A pawn normally moves forward but captures diagonally forward.

That difference makes it one of the first unusual rules a new chess player has to understand.

It moves one way.

It fights another.

Then comes sacrifice.

This is where chess begins teaching you not to judge every move by what disappeared from the board.

If I give up a pawn, you can’t automatically say I made a mistake.

Maybe I did.

Or maybe I opened a file.

Maybe I opened a diagonal.

Maybe I pulled one of your pieces away.

Maybe I gained time.

Maybe I created an attack.

The important part is purpose.

A sacrifice without purpose is just a lost piece.

A sacrifice with a reason can change the position.

That difference becomes much more important later in the song.

Never turn back never retreat
Cross the board promotion waits

The pawn has no reverse gear.

It moves forward.

That’s it.

That gave me Never turn back never retreat.

It sounds like a soldier’s line because that’s the character I gave the pawns, but it also describes the basic direction of their movement.

Then something extraordinary waits at the other end.

Promotion.

A pawn that reaches the farthest rank can be promoted.

Most people immediately think queen because the queen is so powerful, although chess allows promotion to a queen, rook, bishop or knight.

Think about the journey of that pawn.

It began with the most limited movement.

One square at a time in ordinary movement.

It had to survive the board.

It had to keep advancing.

Then it reaches the other side and becomes something else.

That’s one of the best stories already built into chess.

I didn’t have to invent a metaphor.

The game gave it to me.

Ignore that pawn let it pass
It could come back a queen at last

This is the payoff.

You ignored it because it looked small.

You had bigger things to worry about.

There was a queen over here.

A rook over there.

A knight attacking something.

Meanwhile that pawn kept moving.

Now it’s one square away from promotion and suddenly everybody is paying attention.

I think people understand that feeling even if they have never played chess.

We underestimate things because of what they look like today.

Sometimes we underestimate people for the same reason.

We look at where somebody starts and decide where they’re capable of finishing.

Life has taught me not to do that too quickly.

I’ve had my own times when people could look at me and make assumptions based on where I was standing at that particular moment.

But one moment isn’t a whole life.

One square isn’t the whole board.

The pawn doesn’t ask you to believe it can become powerful.

It keeps moving until the board proves it.

That is where I want to leave Part 1 of this journey, because the pawn has crossed its first major lesson and the next piece is waiting.

The straight-moving soldier is about to step aside.

Now something much stranger is coming onto the board.

My knights ride with an L-shaped attack.

 

SECTION ONE

LYRIC JOURNEY

PART 2

My knights ride with an L-shaped attack
2 then 1 & they dont look back
Jump right over anything there
U never know where they’ll appear

Now the movement changes completely.

The pawns were straightforward. They move forward. They capture diagonally. There is something almost military about the way they advance across the board.

Then the knight arrives and refuses to behave like anything else.

Two squares in one direction and one across. That L-shaped attack gives the piece its identity.

I deliberately used nites in the song, but we’re still talking about the knight on the chessboard, and what I like about it is how different it is from everything around it.

A rook needs an open line.

A bishop needs an open diagonal.

A queen needs a clear path.

The knight doesn’t care what’s standing between where it begins and where it lands.

It jumps.

That makes it strange when you’re first learning chess. You get used to looking at lines and suddenly this piece doesn’t follow them.

That is why I wrote:

U never know where theyll appear

Of course, if you understand the knight, you absolutely can calculate where it can legally go. It isn’t appearing randomly.

I’m talking about the feeling it creates.

A knight can attack something from a position that doesn’t look dangerous if you’re only thinking in straight lines.

I like that because different doesn’t mean weaker.

Sometimes different is exactly what creates the advantage.

We have a habit in life of wanting things to fit patterns we already understand. When something doesn’t, we can assume it’s wrong.

The knight would be a terrible rook.

It would be a terrible bishop.

Good thing it doesn’t have to be either one.

Its strength comes from being the knight.

Fork ur king put ur queen in sight
1 crooked move can change the fight

Now that strange movement becomes a weapon.

A fork is one of those chess ideas that makes immediate sense once you’ve experienced it.

One piece attacks two targets.

A knight is especially good at creating that kind of problem because of the way it moves.

Put the king in check while attacking the queen and suddenly the player has a decision forced on them. The check has to be dealt with. If the position allows it, the queen may be lost afterward.

That is why I put the two most important personalities in the song into the same moment.

The king is under pressure.

The queen is in sight.

One crooked move can change the fight.

Crooked isn’t an official chess description. That’s me describing what the knight feels like compared with all those straight and diagonal lines.

The move looks crooked.

The thinking behind it isn’t.

That distinction matters.

Something can look strange and still make perfect sense when you understand what it’s designed to do.

My bishops cut diagonal lines
1 on the dark 1 on the light

Now the knight jumps away and the board changes again.

The bishops give us diagonals.

One begins on a light square.

The other begins on a dark square.

And that is where each one stays.

A bishop that starts on the light squares can never suddenly decide it wants to operate on the dark squares. Its movement keeps it on the same colour complex throughout the game.

That sounds like a limitation.

It is.

But chess keeps showing us that limitations and usefulness can exist together.

The bishop doesn’t waste time wishing it could move like the knight.

It doesn’t need to become a rook.

Give it the right diagonal and let it do what it does.

That is enough.

Corner to corner they watch their lane
Open an angle & feel the pain

This is where the bishop becomes dangerous.

A diagonal can stretch a long way across an open board.

Sometimes a bishop is sitting there doing almost nothing because one of its own pieces is blocking the road.

Then something moves.

The diagonal opens.

Suddenly a piece that looked quiet is staring directly into the position.

I like that moment in chess.

The danger wasn’t necessarily created when the line opened.

Sometimes the potential was already there.

The line opening simply revealed it.

That’s worth remembering because we often notice consequences only when they become visible.

Sometimes the conditions that created them were sitting there much earlier.

The bishop was already on the board.

The diagonal was already part of the board.

All it needed was an opening.

My rooks stand strong like castle walls
Up & down across it all

Now we leave the diagonals and go back to straight lines.

The rook naturally gave me the image of a castle wall because of the way the piece itself has traditionally been represented.

It looks solid.

Strong.

Heavy.

So that’s how I wanted it to feel in the song.

The rook moves horizontally or vertically along clear lines.

No jumping.

No L shape.

No diagonal.

Straight roads.

Rank & file they own the road
Clear their path & watch them go

Rank and file are part of the language of chess.

The ranks run across the board.

The files run up and down.

The rook can work along both.

But the line that matters most to me here is:

Clear their path & watch them go

Because having power and being able to use power are two different things.

A rook can be a strong piece, but if it’s buried behind its own pieces with nowhere useful to go, that strength isn’t accomplishing much.

Open the road and the same rook changes character.

Now it can penetrate.

Attack.

Defend.

Control a file.

Reach across a rank.

That idea reaches beyond chess without much effort.

Sometimes people don’t need more ability.

They need an opportunity to use the ability they already have.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the engine.

The road is blocked.

Clear the road and see what happens.

Then comes my queen
Every mans dream

Now she comes back.

I already introduced the queen earlier as a wrecking machine, but this time I wanted to have even more fun with her.

Every mans dream.

That’s not a chess rule.

That’s me having a little laugh inside the song.

Not everything has to become a serious lesson.

I think that’s important in songwriting and in life.

You can have something meaningful to say and still enjoy yourself while saying it.

The queen is already the star in terms of movement, so I gave her the star treatment.

Then I bring her immediately back to the board.

Straight or diagonal fast & clean
Side to side wherever she needs

There is her movement again.

Straight along the ranks and files.

Diagonal across the board.

Forward.

Backward.

Side to side.

As long as the path is clear, she has tremendous reach.

That makes the queen dangerous because she can change from attack to defence quickly.

A queen on one side of the board can sometimes become involved somewhere completely different in a single move.

That’s why beginners often become attached to her.

She feels like the piece that can solve everything.

But chess doesn’t let one piece solve everything.

Protecting her king while taking ur team
She strikes anywhere she can see
Shes a wrecking machine

Now I give the queen two jobs.

Attack the other side.

Protect her own.

That matters because I don’t want the power in this song to become mindless destruction.

The queen isn’t wrecking things just because she can.

She’s part of a position.

She’s part of an objective.

She’s still protecting her king.

That brings us right back to the central idea.

You can have the most powerful piece on the board, but that power still has a purpose.

Power without purpose can become reckless.

Power working with the rest of the position becomes strategy.

And then the chorus returns.

Protect the king.

We’ve travelled further now.

The first time we heard those words, we were only beginning to understand the board.

Since then we’ve met the pawns.

We’ve watched one of them move toward promotion.

We’ve seen the knight jump.

We’ve seen the fork.

We’ve opened the bishops.

We’ve cleared roads for the rooks.

We’ve watched the queen come charging back into the song.

So the chorus doesn’t need another long explanation.

Its meaning hasn’t changed.

Its weight has.

Now we’ve seen the pieces that are supposed to carry out the instruction.

Everything we’ve just learned comes back to those three words.

Protect the king.

Dont forget who this war is for
The king moves 1 square nothing more

Now we finally turn directly toward the king himself.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about everybody around him.

The soldiers.

The nites.

The bishops.

The castle walls.

The wrecking machine.

Now meet the piece all of them are fighting around.

One square.

That’s the strange part.

After giving the queen this huge personality and all that movement, the king can seem almost disappointing.

One square at a time in normal movement.

Yet this is the piece the entire game revolves around.

That contradiction is one of the reasons chess works so well for this song.

The most powerful thing isn’t always the thing that matters most.

Forward backward side to side
Diagonal too nowhere unsafe to hide

The king can move in any direction, but only one square in ordinary movement, and only to a legal square where he is not left under attack.

So even though he has all those directions available, he doesn’t have complete freedom.

Every square around him has to be evaluated.

Is it occupied?

Is it attacked?

Is it safe?

Can I go there?

That is what I wanted in nowhere unsafe to hide.

The king can’t simply run onto a square because it looks empty.

Empty doesn’t mean safe.

That’s another little chess idea I like.

A square can contain nothing and still be dangerous.

What matters isn’t only what is sitting there.

What matters is what can reach it.

He may be limited he may move slow
Lose ur king & the whole game goes

There it is.

The entire contradiction in two lines.

Limited.

Slow.

Essential.

In actual chess, the king isn’t physically captured. Checkmate ends the game when the king is under attack and there is no legal way out.

But in everyday language, lose ur king gets the point across immediately.

Your king is finished.

Your game is finished.

This is where I think the title becomes more important than it was at the beginning.

PROTECT THE KING isn’t just a catchy phrase anymore.

We’ve now travelled far enough through the board to understand why.

The queen may be the dream.

The king is the responsibility.

Castle him early rook by his side
2 pieces move & the king can hide

Now the king gets some help.

Castling is one of the most unusual moves in chess because the king and rook are both involved in the same move when the legal requirements are satisfied.

For the song, I didn’t want to stop and give a rulebook explanation of every condition required to castle.

I wanted the purpose.

Get the king toward safety.

Bring the rook into a more useful position.

Two pieces move and the shape of the position changes.

That’s strategy.

One decision accomplishing more than one thing.

I like decisions like that.

In construction, in business, in problem solving, in life, the best solution isn’t always the one that fixes only the thing directly in front of you.

Sometimes you can make one good move and improve two problems at once.

That’s what castling feels like to me in this part of the song.

Build a fortress guard every square
1 careless move & check is there

Now we’re thinking about prevention.

Don’t wait until the attack is already sitting on top of you.

Build the fortress.

Guard the important squares.

Pay attention.

Because one careless move can change the position.

I use the word careless deliberately.

There is a difference between making a move that turns out badly and making a move without looking.

Nobody plays perfect chess.

People make mistakes.

Even great players make mistakes.

The lesson isn’t that you must never be wrong.

The lesson is to reduce the mistakes that happen simply because you didn’t take the time to look.

That matters to me outside chess too.

I’ve made mistakes in life.

Everybody has.

There are mistakes you make because you didn’t know something.

There are mistakes you make because circumstances changed.

And then there are mistakes where, if you’re being truthful with yourself, you knew you should have slowed down.

Those are the ones that can bother you later.

The board gives you a simple habit.

Before you move, look again.

This is my kingdom Im making my claim
There aint no dice in a thinking mans game

Now the confidence returns again.

This is my kingdom.

I’m taking space.

I’m building a position.

I’m making my claim.

Then comes one of the lines that really defines what I like about chess:

There aint no dice in a thinking mans game.

I don’t roll a six and suddenly get to move my bishop six squares through another piece.

I don’t draw a lucky card and get my queen back.

The rules are sitting there for both players.

That doesn’t mean life works the same way.

Life absolutely contains chance.

Where we’re born can change our opportunities.

An accident can change a life.

Illness can arrive without permission.

People can do things to us that we never chose.

So I would never use chess to tell somebody that everything that happens in life is simply the result of their decisions.

That’s not true.

What chess does give us is a smaller world where responsibility becomes easier to see.

I make my move.

You make yours.

Then I have to respond to the position that exists.

I can’t control your move.

I can control what I do after it.

That is where the thinking mans game matters to me.

Not because a thinking person never makes mistakes.

Because thinking gives you a better chance of understanding what you’re about to do before you do it.

Every move has reason every piece a place
Every square I control takes ur space

Now we’re getting deeper into the position.

A good move usually isn’t good because it looks impressive.

It has a job.

Develop a piece.

Protect something.

Attack something.

Control something.

Create space.

Take space away.

Prepare something that isn’t obvious yet.

That is what I mean by every move has reason.

Not every move I make in a real chess game will be brilliant.

Far from it.

The idea is that I should know why I’m making it.

Every piece a place follows naturally.

A knight can be powerful in one position and useless in another.

A bishop can be trapped behind its own pawns or suddenly become dangerous on an open diagonal.

A rook can sit doing almost nothing until a file opens.

Position changes value.

Then:

Every square I control takes ur space.

The board hasn’t physically become smaller.

Still sixty-four squares.

But your usable world can shrink.

A square controlled by one of my pieces may no longer be available to your king.

A file controlled by my rook can become dangerous.

A diagonal owned by my bishop can cut off movement.

That is how pressure builds.

Not always through capture.

Sometimes through restriction.

And now we arrive at one of the most important turning points in the song.

Trade a pawn sacrifice a knight.
Give up a rook if the timing is rite

We’ve already talked about sacrifice with the pawn.

Now the price gets higher.

A knight.  

A rook.

Pieces you don’t normally want to throw away.

But the line doesn’t say give them away for nothing.

It says:

If the timing is rite.

That’s everything.

A sacrifice has to serve something.

Maybe it opens the king.

Maybe it forces a response.

Maybe it clears a line.

Maybe it creates a mating attack.

Maybe the material you give away matters less than the position you receive.

The board forces you to ask a question that can be uncomfortable.

What matters more?

The piece I’m holding onto?

Or the position I can create by letting it go?

Sometimes U lose to pull them in
Sometimes losing is how U win

This is one of the landmarks of the entire song.

I wanted to stay here because this is where PROTECT THE KING reaches far beyond chess.

Sometimes you deliberately allow something to look like a loss because you’re thinking about what comes after it.

In chess, that’s easy to understand when a sacrifice works.

You give up material.

Your opponent takes it.

They think they’re winning.

Then they discover that taking the piece put them exactly where you wanted them.

But life needs more honesty than a chess metaphor.

Sometimes losing is just losing.

I’ve lost things in my life that I would never pretend were secretly victories.

There are people we lose who don’t come back.

There are years we don’t get returned.

There are consequences that can’t be reset by putting the pieces back on their starting squares.

So I don’t want to turn this lyric into one of those sayings where every bad thing is magically supposed to be good for you.

That’s not what I mean.

What I mean is that sometimes we choose to give something up because we understand what we’re trying to protect or build.

Maybe you give up comfort to create something.

Maybe you give up pride to save a relationship.

Maybe you walk away from an argument you could keep fighting because winning that argument isn’t worth what the fight is doing to both people.

Maybe you sacrifice time now because you’re building something that matters later.

The value is not in losing.

The value is in knowing why you accepted the loss.

That’s exactly the difference between a chess sacrifice and a blunder.

One has purpose.

The other doesn’t.

And now that idea has been established, the song is ready to return to the two people who started this whole thing.

The chair is still there.

The board is still there.

The opponent who tried to get inside my mind is still sitting across from me.

Only now the board looks completely different.

Sit down try to mess with my mind
You’ve looked ahead but ur out of time

 

SECTION ONE

LYRIC JOURNEY

PART 3

Sit down try to mess with my mind
You’ve looked ahead but ur out of time

We have come back to almost the same place where the song began.

Two people.

One board.

One mind trying to outthink the other.

But we aren’t really in the same place anymore.

At the beginning, the challenge was fresh. Thirty-two pieces were facing each other and neither player had shown what they were going to do.

Now there is history on the board.

Pieces have moved.

Some have disappeared.

Lines have opened.

Squares have been claimed.

Sacrifices have been made.

The king has been protected.

Plans have been built.

The person across from me has been trying to mess with my mind from the beginning, and now I’m answering that challenge.

You’ve looked ahead but ur out of time.

I like that line because it doesn’t say my opponent didn’t think.

They did.

They looked ahead.

They set traps.

They played the game.

But thinking ahead doesn’t guarantee that you’ll see everything.

That’s important.

Chess isn’t a contest between one person who thinks and another person who doesn’t. When two capable players sit down, both are trying to understand the position.

Sometimes you simply see something the other person misses.

Sometimes they see something you miss.

Sometimes both people see the same idea but calculate the ending differently.

That’s why chess stays interesting.

If knowing the rules guaranteed victory, there wouldn’t be much of a game.

U set ur traps U tried ur tricks
I’ve built this since move #6

This is one of my favourite moments in the song because now the ending starts revealing its history.

My opponent wasn’t doing nothing.

U set ur traps.

U tried ur tricks.

They had a plan too.

That matters to me because I never wanted the opponent in this song to sound stupid. What satisfaction would there be in beating somebody who had no idea what they were doing?

I wanted a battle.

You tried to fool me.

You looked ahead.

You challenged me.

Now I’m telling you something you didn’t realize.

Ive built this since move #6.

The exact number gives the line personality. It makes the plan feel like it has been sitting underneath the game for a long time.

Maybe something I did on move six didn’t look dangerous at all when I did it.

Maybe you noticed it and thought you understood it.

Maybe you forgot about it ten moves later.

But I didn’t.

That is what long-term planning looks like.

The final move gets the applause.

The early move may be the one that made the final move possible.

We do this all the time when we look at successful people.

We see the result.

We don’t always see move number six.

We see somebody’s business after it succeeds.

We don’t see every year they struggled.

We hear the finished song.

We don’t hear every version that didn’t work.

We see somebody who knows how to operate a machine, play an instrument, build something, repair something or run a company.

We don’t see the thousands of little decisions that taught them how.

The visible result is often the checkmate.

The real story began much earlier.

That is why this line belongs exactly where it does.

The song is telling the opponent that the ending didn’t suddenly appear.

They have been walking toward it.

Look at ur board see what remains
Ur king has nowhere to escape

Now I don’t need to brag anymore.

Look.

That’s all.

Look at your board.

The evidence is sitting in front of you.

This is one of the things I respect most about chess. Eventually the position speaks for itself.

You can argue about whether a move was smart.

You can argue about what somebody should have done five moves earlier.

But when the king has no legal escape from check and nothing can remove the threat, the game has answered.

Look at ur board see what remains.

That line also asks the listener to remember where we started.

Thirty-two pieces face to face.

How many are left now?

Where are they?

Which ones still matter?

Which ones are too far away to help?

Which squares are still available?

The battlefield has been reduced by decisions.

Then comes the sentence the whole song has been working toward:

Ur king has nowhere to escape.

Now the title has become reality.

All those warnings to protect the king weren’t just part of the chorus.

This is what happens when the protection finally fails.

My rook owns the file my bishop the lane

The ending begins bringing back the pieces we met earlier.

I like that because I didn’t want the first half of the song to teach us about rooks and bishops and then forget about them.

The journey has to connect.

Earlier we said:

Rank & file they own the road.

Now:

My rook owns the file.

Earlier we said:

Corner to corner they watch their lane.

Now:

My bishop the lane.

The song is cashing in what it taught us.

The rook controls the straight road.

The bishop controls the diagonal.

The king is running out of places to go.

That is how a mating net can feel.

The board is still sixty-four squares, but the king’s world has become very small.

A square over here is controlled by the rook.

Another square is covered by the bishop.

Something else is occupied.

Something else is unavailable.

One by one, the exits disappear.

My nite took the square U thought was safe

And here comes the strange one again.

The nite.

Earlier I told you:

U never know where theyll appear.

Now we find out why that mattered.

The square you thought was safe isn’t safe.

The knight has it.

I like bringing the knight back at this exact moment because its movement is different from the long visible lines of the rook and bishop.

You may see the rook.

You may see the bishop.

Then the knight controls a square from that crooked L-shaped angle you forgot to calculate.

That is how mistakes happen.

You don’t always miss the obvious threat.

Sometimes you miss the unusual one.

And notice the wording:

The square U thought was safe.

Not the square that looked empty.

The square you thought was safe.

There is a difference.

Safety isn’t determined by appearance.

It is determined by what can reach you.

That lesson was already sitting earlier in the song when we walked with the king.

Now it matters.

My queen moves in

This line needed to be short.

We’ve spent the whole song building the queen’s personality.

Wait till U meet my queen.

She owns every line between.

Every mans dream.

Shes a wrecking machine.

Now I don’t need to tell you any of that again.

Three words are enough.

My queen moves in.

She doesn’t need another introduction.

We already know who she is.

We already know what she can do.

We know the rook owns the file.

We know the bishop has the lane.

We know the nite has taken the square that looked safe.

Now the queen enters the position.

Everything that came before has prepared this moment.

And then I wanted the song to stop talking.

Check

One word.

That’s all it needs.

Check changes the conversation.

Up until this point, both players had choices.

Attack here.

Defend there.

Trade something.

Move a pawn.

Develop a piece.

Set a trap.

Now the king is under direct threat.

Answer it.

The game demands a response.

You can’t pretend the check isn’t there.

You can’t decide you’d rather attack my queen somewhere else unless that move also legally resolves the check.

The king comes first.

Again.

Protect the king.

The chorus has been warning us all along.

Now there is no chorus needed.

The position itself is saying it.

Look again

I love this line because I give the opponent one more chance.

Look.

Maybe I missed something.

Maybe you see an escape.

Maybe there is a piece that can block.

Maybe you can capture the attacker.

Maybe the king has a square.

Don’t surrender just because I said check.

Look again.

There is something I respect about that idea.

Before you accept that something is finished, make sure it really is.

Before you tell yourself there is no answer, look again.

Before you accept somebody else’s conclusion, look for yourself.

That doesn’t mean there is always an escape.

Sometimes there isn’t.

But you should know because you looked, not because somebody told you.

So we look.

No square left

First possibility gone.

The king can’t move away.

Every legal destination is closed.

Maybe one is controlled by the rook.

Another by the bishop.

Another by the nite.

Another by the queen.

Maybe another is occupied in a way that doesn’t help.

Whatever the exact position imagined by the song, the result is what matters.

No square left.

No piece can defend

Second possibility gone.

Maybe the king can’t move, but another piece could save him.

Not anymore.

No piece can defend.

Nothing can interpose where interposition would be legal.

Nothing can capture the attacking piece in a way that resolves the check.

Nothing can change the position enough to save the king.

The army we spent the entire song meeting has reached the moment where the king needs it most.

And it can’t help.

That is why protecting the king has to begin before the final attack.

Once the mating net is complete, wanting protection isn’t enough.

Preparation had to happen earlier.

No place to run

Now the language becomes less technical and more human.

No place to run.

You don’t have to understand chess notation to understand those words.

We’ve all had moments where options seemed to disappear.

That feeling is part of why checkmate works so well dramatically.

The board closes around one piece.

Not through force in the physical sense.

Through control.

You are surrounded by squares you cannot legally use.

This is the end

Now there is nothing left to calculate.

I didn’t want a long speech here.

The song has earned the ending.

The opponent took the challenge.

They picked their side.

They tried to mess with my mind.

They set traps.

They looked ahead.

They fought.

Now the board has reached its answer.

This is the end.

Checkmate

That’s the destination.

One word again.

Check was the warning.

Checkmate is the conclusion.

In chess, the king isn’t physically taken from the board. The game ends when the king is in check and there is no legal move that can remove that threat.

I actually like that more than capturing the king.

You don’t need to knock him over.

You don’t need to remove him.

You don’t need another move.

Everybody looking at the position understands what comes next.

Nothing.

The game is over.

That is checkmate.

But the song isn’t quite finished.

I wanted to return to the numbers that opened the battle.

64 squares
32 came

We started with sixty-four squares.

We finish with sixty-four squares.

The battlefield never changed size.

We started with thirty-two pieces.

32 came.

They entered together at the beginning.

Everything that happened after that came from the game played inside those boundaries.

I like returning to those numbers because it closes the circle.

At the beginning they represented possibility.

At the end they represent history.

Same board.

Completely different position.

That’s what decisions do.

1 king standing
That’s the game

This is the final picture I wanted.

One king standing.

That’s the game.

Not literally because chess normally ends with both kings physically remaining on the board. The line is the language of the song and the battle we’ve been travelling through. One king has survived the fight. The other has been checkmated.

The challenge has an answer.

And when I look back from this final lyric to the first one, the whole journey makes sense to me.

Be the Man U always wanted to be.

Take ur seat.

Pick ur side.

Make ur move.

Think ahead.

Set your traps.

Use your pieces.

Understand their strengths.

Don’t underestimate the pawn.

Don’t forget the strange movement of the nite.

Open the bishop’s lane.

Clear the rook’s road.

Respect the queen.

Castle when the position allows it and when it makes sense.

Understand sacrifice.

Know what you’re giving up and why.

Think beyond the move directly in front of you.

And through everything else, remember what the battle depends on.

Then the chorus returns for the final time.

This time I don’t need to explain it.

We’ve lived it.

At the beginning, Protect the king was an instruction.

In the middle, it became a responsibility.

At the end, after we’ve watched one king run out of squares, it becomes the lesson the entire game was trying to teach us.

Protect the king.

That brings us back to something bigger than chess, but I don’t want to leave the song at the very end.

The song deserves the last word.

You can decide what your own king represents.

You can decide what in your life deserves more protection.

You can decide what you’re willing to sacrifice and what you’re not.

You can decide whether you need to think another move ahead before making your next decision.

Those answers belong to you.

For me, the reason I wanted to write PROTECT THE KING was never just to list the rules of chess.

I wanted the listener to sit at the board.

I wanted the pieces to have personalities.

I wanted the queen to feel dangerous.

I wanted the knight.  to come from an unexpected direction.

I wanted the rook and bishop to close the roads.

I wanted sacrifice to mean something.

I wanted the final check to slow everything down.

And I wanted checkmate to feel earned because the listener had travelled through the entire game to reach it.

Now we’ve travelled through it twice.

The first journey was the song.

This one was walking beside the words.

If you go back and listen again, maybe the pawn sounds a little different now.

Maybe you’ll notice why the knight. returns near the end.

Maybe the line Ive built this since move #6 carries a little more weight.

Maybe you’ll hear the queen moving in and already know the king is running out of roads.

And maybe when that chorus comes back one final time, three simple words will carry the weight of everything that happened across those sixty-four squares.

Protect the king.

 

SECTION TWO

THE STORY

WHEN A CHESSBOARD BECOMES MORE THAN A GAME

Chess came into this story through incarceration.

When you spend that much time inside, time itself becomes something you have to deal with. There are only so many walls you can look at. Your body may be confined to a small space, but your mind still needs somewhere to go.

Chess gave the mind somewhere to go.

That is one of the reasons I respect the game.

You can sit across from somebody with a board between you, and for however long that game lasts, something different is happening. You are concentrating. Planning. Watching. Remembering. Trying to anticipate what another person is thinking.

The walls haven’t disappeared.

Your circumstances haven’t magically changed.

But your mind is working.

For me, that matters.

And years later, when I looked at chess as a subject for a song, I realized there was much more sitting on that board than kings, queens and pawns.

There was a story.

SIT DOWN AND MAKE YOUR MOVE

I wanted PROTECT THE KING to begin the same way a real challenge begins.

No long introduction.

No complicated explanation.

Take your seat.

Pick your side.

Make your move.

That is why the opening has that confrontational feeling:

“Be the Man U always wanted to be
Wanna challenge me then take ur seat”

I wanted it to sound like somebody sitting across from you saying, all right, you think you can beat me? Sit down.

There is confidence in it, but there is also respect hidden inside the challenge.

Because once you sit down, I still have to prove I can beat you.

Talking doesn’t move pieces.

Confidence doesn’t protect a king.

The board will eventually expose whether either one of us knows what we’re doing.

I like that about chess.

BLACK OR WHITE

At the beginning, everything looks almost perfectly balanced.

You have your pieces.

I have mine.

You have a king.

I have a king.

You have a queen.

I have a queen.

The same rooks, bishops, knights and pawns are waiting on both sides.

Nobody begins with an extra queen because they had a better day.

Nobody gets three rooks because life has been unfair to them.

Nobody gets to bring another piece onto the board because they suddenly realize they made a terrible decision ten moves ago.

You begin with what the game gives you.

Then your decisions start changing everything.

That fascinated me when I started looking at chess through the eyes of a songwriter.

The starting position may be equal.

The ending usually isn’t.

What happened between those two moments?

Decisions.

THERE AIN’T NO DICE

One of my favourite ideas in the song comes later:

“There aint no dice in a thinking mans game”

That line gets right to the reason chess interests me.

Chance can affect almost everything in life.

Where you’re born.

Who you meet.

What happens around you.

An opportunity that appears at exactly the right time.

Something completely unexpected that knocks your plans sideways.

Chess strips most of that away.

There is no dice.

There is no shuffled deck.

There isn’t a spinner.

The pieces are visible.

The board is visible.

Your opponent sees what you see.

That doesn’t mean both players understand what they’re seeing.

That is where the game becomes interesting.

Information can be sitting right in front of two people and one of them recognizes something the other one doesn’t.

That’s not luck.

That’s observation.

THE BATTLE BEFORE THE BATTLE

People sometimes think chess is about moving pieces.

Of course it is.

But the real game starts before your hand touches the piece.

Why is your opponent doing that?

What are they threatening?

What are they leaving open?

Is that pawn really free?

Why did that bishop move?

Why did the queen suddenly appear there?

What happens if I take this?

What happens if I don’t?

You start asking questions.

Then you begin asking questions about the questions.

Maybe the move I’m looking at isn’t the real threat.

Maybe my opponent wants me to notice it.

Maybe I’m being invited into something.

That is where the psychological side of chess becomes interesting to me.

I wanted that feeling inside the song:

“Set ur trap make me believe
U see what I cannot see”

You are not literally reading somebody’s mind.

You are reading their decisions.

Every move gives you information.

Sometimes it gives you truthful information.

Sometimes somebody is trying to sell you a lie.

THINK THREE MOVES AHEAD

The song says:

“Think 3 moves ahead or fall behind”

I wasn’t trying to establish some magical rule that good chess players think exactly three moves ahead.

The point is preparation.

Don’t only think about what happens when you move.

Think about what happens after I answer.

Then what happens when you answer me?

That’s where chess begins teaching something larger.

A lot of mistakes in life happen because we think only about the first result.

If I do this, I get that.

Fine.

Then what?

What happens after you get what you wanted?

What does somebody else do in response?

What did your decision open?

What did it close?

What problem did it solve?

What new problem did it create?

Chess forces that kind of thinking because the other person gets a vote.

You don’t control their move.

You control yours.

Then you deal with their answer.

THE PAWNS

I knew I couldn’t write this song properly without giving every major type of piece its own identity.

I started with the pawns because they are the front line.

They are also easy to underestimate.

A pawn isn’t glamorous.

It normally moves forward one square at a time.

It captures differently from the way it moves.

It cannot simply turn around and retreat.

Compared with the queen, it looks almost powerless.

So I made them soldiers:

“My pawns are soldiers first in line”

That felt right.

They’re standing in front of everything else.

They advance.

They create structure.

They fight for space.

They can be sacrificed.

But what I really liked was where their story could end.

Promotion.

Get that pawn all the way across the board and suddenly the little piece somebody ignored can become something enormously powerful.

That gave me:

“Ignore that pawn let it pass
It could come back a queen at last”

There is a lesson sitting inside that without me having to force one into it.

Don’t assume something is harmless simply because it looks small today.

Potential changes things.

THE KNIGHT THAT REFUSES TO WALK STRAIGHT

Then I got to the knights.

I spell it “knight.” in the finalized lyrics because that’s the style of this version of the song, but the chess piece itself gave me something completely different to work with.

Everything about a knight feels unusual compared with the long straight or diagonal movement of the other pieces.

It moves in that L-shaped pattern.

It can jump over pieces.

It can attack from places that don’t always feel obvious to somebody who isn’t watching carefully.

That gave the knight personality.

“U never know where they’ll appear”

Of course, on a chessboard you can calculate exactly where a knight can go. It isn’t magically appearing anywhere it wants.

The lyric is about the feeling of it.

A knight can suddenly become a problem because its attack doesn’t follow the same visual roads as a rook, bishop or queen.

And then there is the fork.

One knight attacking two valuable targets can turn a position around quickly.

That’s why I put the king and queen into the same threat:

“Fork ur king put ur queen in sight”

Now the player has a problem.

Protect one thing and maybe lose another.

Chess becomes a game of priorities.

BISHOPS ON DARK AND LIGHT

The bishops gave me another visual.

One lives on the light squares.

One lives on the dark squares.

Neither can ever change colour.

That limitation doesn’t make them useless.

It defines how they become useful.

Give a bishop an open diagonal and suddenly it can influence a huge stretch of the board.

So I wrote:

“Corner to corner they watch their lane
Open an angle & feel the pain”

Again, I wanted somebody listening to the song to be able to picture the board.

A diagonal opens.

Something that seemed far away suddenly isn’t far away anymore.

That’s chess.

A square can look safe until one piece moves and reveals another.

THE ROOKS AND THE OPEN ROAD

Rooks gave me strength.

They look like little castles, so the image almost wrote itself:

“My rooks stand strong like castle walls”

But their real power comes when they have room.

Files.

Ranks.

Open roads.

A rook trapped behind its own pieces isn’t doing much.

Clear the path and the same piece becomes dangerous.

I liked that idea because once again the board was showing me something beyond chess.

Strength isn’t only about what you possess.

Position matters.

Opportunity matters.

Space matters.

You can have a powerful piece and still use it badly.

You can have ability in life and never put yourself in a position where that ability gets to work.

Chess kept giving me those connections.

I didn’t have to manufacture them.

They were already sitting there.

THEN COMES MY QUEEN

I wasn’t going to write a chess song and make the queen boring.

No chance.

The queen has extraordinary freedom compared with the other pieces.

Straight.

Diagonal.

Forward.

Backward.

Sideways.

As far as an open line allows.

So when she enters this song, she gets an entrance.

“Then comes my queen
Every mans dream”

Then I let her go to work.

There is some humour in the way I wrote her. There is confidence. There is exaggeration for the personality of the song.

But underneath that, the chess is still there.

She is dangerous because of her mobility.

That is why I keep returning to:

“She’s a wrecking machine”

She’s supposed to feel powerful.

But there is another chess lesson hiding there too.

The strongest piece on your board can still be lost.

Power doesn’t make you untouchable.

Get careless with your queen and somebody will gladly take her from you.

AND YET THE KING IS MORE IMPORTANT

This is where chess becomes beautifully strange.

The queen can do almost everything.

The king can move one square.

Yet the entire game revolves around the king.

That contradiction is the heart of PROTECT THE KING.

Power and importance are not always the same thing.

The queen is more powerful in movement.

The king is more important to survival.

Lose the queen and you keep playing.

Lose the game around your king and it’s over.

That is why the chorus doesn’t say:

Protect the queen.

It says:

“Protect the king.”

Everything comes back to that.

CASTLING AND PREPARATION

I also wanted castling in the song because it is one of those chess moves that even looks different.

Under the legal conditions for castling, the king and rook participate in the same move.

That immediately gave me a visual of pulling the king toward safety and building protection around him.

“Castle him early rook by his side
2 pieces move & the king can hide”

The important idea for the song is preparation.

Don’t wait until everything is collapsing before you start thinking about safety.

That is good chess advice.

It’s not terrible life advice either.

SACRIFICE DOESN’T ALWAYS MEAN LOSING

This became one of the most important ideas in the entire song.

Chess teaches you very quickly that counting pieces isn’t enough.

Being ahead in material can be good.

It doesn’t guarantee anything.

Sometimes you deliberately give something away because what you receive in return is more valuable.

Position.

Tempo.

An attack.

An opening.

A forced response.

Maybe even checkmate.

That’s why I wrote:

“Trade a pawn sacrifice a knight. 
Give up a rook if the timing is rite”

The important words there are “if the timing is rite.”

Sacrifice without purpose isn’t strategy.

It’s just losing pieces.

That difference matters.

Then comes the line that takes the idea beyond the board:

“Sometimes U lose to pull them in
Sometimes losing is how U win”

I’ve lived enough life to understand that winning and losing aren’t always as simple as they first appear.

Sometimes you win something and discover later what it cost you.

Sometimes you lose something and only years later understand what it taught you.

Chess compresses that idea into a board.

You give something up.

Now show me what you gained.

MOVE NUMBER SIX

Near the end of the song, I wanted everything to tighten.

The opponent has been trying to get inside my head.

Setting traps.

Planning.

Looking ahead.

Then I answer:

“I’ve built this since move #6”

I like that because suddenly the listener is asked to reconsider everything that came before it.

What if the ending didn’t begin at the end?

What if it began much earlier?

That’s one of the beautiful things about a strong chess combination.

The final move gets the attention.

But the final move may only work because of something that happened several moves earlier.

The checkmate is the visible ending.

The thinking that created it may have started long before.

CHECK

I deliberately wanted the ending to slow down.

After all those pieces, all those movements, all that confidence and all that strategy, we arrive at one word:

“Check”

Now look again.

Don’t panic.

Look at the board.

Can the king move?

Can another piece block?

Can the attacking piece be captured?

Is there a legal defence?

The song gives the opponent that final moment.

“Look again
No square left
No piece can defend
No place to run
This is the end”

Then comes the word the entire song has been moving toward.

“Checkmate”

Nothing else needs to happen.

The argument is over.

The board has answered.

64 SQUARES

I wanted the ending to return to where we started.

The song opened with:

“64 squares nowhere to hide
32 pieces face to face”

After everything that happened, we return to those numbers:

“64 squares
32 came
1 king standing
Thats the game”

That’s the whole journey reduced to four lines.

The board never got bigger.

It was always 64 squares.

The pieces never needed somewhere else to go.

Everything happened inside the same boundaries.

What changed was the position.

And that, more than anything, is why I think chess makes such a good MOITA song.

Give two people the same board.

Give them the same pieces.

Give them the same rules.

Then watch what their minds create.

The pieces tell you how they are allowed to move.

They don’t tell you what move to make.

That part belongs to you.

 

SECTION THREE

THE LYRIC JOURNEY

The first words of PROTECT THE KING don’t introduce the board politely.

They challenge you.

“Be the Man U always wanted to be
Wanna challenge me then take ur seat”

That is where this journey starts.

Before a pawn moves, before a clock starts, before anybody says check, there are two people sitting across from each other.

One of them has challenged the other.

Now the talking has to stop.

Take your seat.

I like beginning there because chess has a way of stripping away the noise. You can tell me how good you are. You can tell me what you’re going to do. You can try to intimidate me before we begin.

Eventually you have to touch a piece.

And once you do, your decisions start becoming visible.

PICK YOUR SIDE

“Black or white U pick ur side
64 squares nowhere to hide
32 pieces face to face
Every move a fight for space”

Now the battlefield appears.

Sixty-four squares.

Thirty-two pieces at the beginning.

Sixteen belong to you.

Sixteen belong to me.

Chess is played on an 8-by-8 board, alternating light and dark squares. The dimensions never change during the game. What changes is control.

That word matters.

Control.

At the beginning, pieces occupy their familiar positions. Then the centre starts opening. Pawns advance. Knights develop. Bishops find diagonals. Kings look for safety. Rooks wait for useful files.

Slowly, the board becomes something created by the decisions of the two people playing it.

That is why I wrote:

“Every move a fight for space”

You don’t have to capture something on every move to accomplish something.

Sometimes taking control of one important square is enough.

Sometimes preventing your opponent from occupying that square matters just as much.

The battle isn’t only over pieces.

It’s over possibilities.

ONE WRONG SQUARE

“Im ur opponent make ur move
One wrong square & U could lose”

That doesn’t mean every small mistake immediately loses a chess game.

It means consequences can begin with one decision.

Put something on the wrong square.

Leave something undefended.

Open a diagonal you didn’t notice.

Move a pawn and discover that the square it used to protect has become weak.

The board remembers what you did.

You can’t rewind the position because you suddenly understand your mistake.

That is one reason chess can be unforgiving.

It’s also one reason it teaches discipline.

Before you make the move, look.

THE GAME INSIDE THE MIND

“Sit down see if U can mess with my mind
Think 3 moves ahead or fall behind”

Now we leave the physical pieces for a moment and enter the psychological game.

You are trying to understand me.

I’m trying to understand you.

But chess has an interesting honesty built into it.

I cannot secretly move a rook when you’re not looking.

My pieces are right there.

You can see them.

The deception comes from intention.

I may show you something and hope you interpret it incorrectly.

That brings us naturally to:

“Set ur trap make me believe
U see what I cannot see”

A trap works best when the other player thinks they’re making a good decision.

That’s an important distinction.

If I can see the trap, it isn’t much of a trap.

The temptation has to look believable.

Maybe you offer me a pawn.

Maybe I think you blundered.

Maybe you want me to take it because my piece will be pulled away from somewhere more important.

Suddenly a little chess lesson starts sounding familiar outside chess.

Not everything offered to us is necessarily being offered for our benefit.

Sometimes it helps to ask one more question:

Why does this look so easy?

Then return to the board.

EVERY SQUARE IS CALLING MY NAME

“This is my board I know this game
Every square is calling my name”

This is confidence.

Not certainty.

There is a difference.

Certainty says I cannot lose.

Confidence says I understand what I’m doing.

Chess punishes the first one quickly if it becomes arrogance.

I wanted the player in this song to have swagger. He knows the board. He wants his opponent to feel that confidence.

And then he introduces the most powerful piece he has.

WAIT TILL U MEET MY QUEEN

“Wait till U meet my queen
She owns every line between
Straight or diagonal fast & clean
She’s a wrecking machine”

Here comes the queen.

She combines the movement patterns of a rook and bishop: along ranks, files and diagonals, as long as her path is unobstructed.

That makes her extraordinarily mobile.

But I didn’t want to describe her like a textbook.

I wanted her to have attitude.

So she becomes the wrecking machine.

The lyric makes her feel almost unstoppable.

Almost.

Because chess is about to teach us something important.

The most powerful piece isn’t the piece that decides whether the game continues.

PROTECT THE KING

“Protect the king
Protect the king
Every piece will fight & fall
Protect the king”

This is the law of the song.

It is also the central reality of chess.

Pieces disappear.

The game continues.

A queen can be captured.

The game continues.

Both rooks can disappear.

The game continues.

Your bishops can be gone.

Your knights can be gone.

Pawn after pawn can leave the board.

As long as the position remains legally playable and your king has not been checkmated, you still have a game.

That is why the chorus needed to be simple.

After all the movement and strategy, one objective remains.

Protect the king.

THE FIRST SOLDIERS MOVE

“My pawns are soldiers first in line
1 step forward taking their time”

Now we begin walking through the army.

The pawns stand in front.

They normally move forward one square, with the option of advancing two squares from their starting position if the path is clear. They capture one square diagonally forward.

Already, the pawn teaches a beginner something unusual about chess.

It doesn’t capture the way it moves.

That is why the next lyric matters:

“Strike diagonal left or right”

Move straight.

Fight diagonally.

Simple once you understand it.

Confusing until you do.

SACRIFICE

“Sacrifice to control the fight
Never turn back never retreat”

Pawns cannot move backward.

Once that pawn advances, its previous square is behind it permanently.

That creates commitment.

Pawn moves can be especially important because unlike many pieces, the pawn can’t simply return to where it came from on the next move.

That makes pawn structure part of the long memory of a chess position.

And sometimes a pawn is sacrificed.

Not because it has no value.

Because something else has more value.

Development.

Position.

An open file.

An attack.

Time.

The initiative.

The sacrifice has to buy something.

Otherwise you’re just giving away a pawn.

That distinction becomes increasingly important as this song continues.

THE LITTLE PIECE THAT BECOMES A QUEEN

“Cross the board promotion waits
Ignore that pawn let it pass
It could come back a queen at last”

This is one of my favourite parts of chess.

A pawn reaches the farthest rank and earns promotion. Under chess rules it may be promoted to a queen, rook, bishop or knight.

It does not have to become a queen, although queen promotion is common because of the queen’s power.

Think about what that means inside the story.

The piece that started with the least mobility can travel all the way across the board and transform.

The pawn didn’t become more important because somebody felt sorry for it.

It earned its way there one square at a time.

That is where I think people can find their own meaning without me forcing one on them.

How many times do we underestimate somebody because we’re looking only at where they are today?

What happens when that person keeps moving?

That’s the beauty of the pawn.

Its beginning does not tell you its ending.

HERE COME THE NITES

“My knight.  ride with an L-shaped attack
2 then 1 & they don’t look back”

Now the geometry changes.

The knight doesn’t travel along an open line.

Its move forms an L shape: two squares in one direction and one square perpendicular to that.

Then comes its special ability:

“Jump right over anything there”

A knight can jump over intervening pieces.

That makes it completely different from the rook, bishop and queen.

Block a rook’s road and the rook stops.

Block a bishop’s diagonal and the bishop stops.

Put pieces around a knight and, provided a legal destination square is available, the knight may still jump.

Different piece.

Different rules.

Different strengths.

That matters because good strategy isn’t about wishing every piece behaved the same way.

It’s about understanding what each one can do.

THE FORK

“U never know where they’ll appear
Fork ur king put ur queen in sight
1 crooked move can change the fight”

Now the knight shows why its unusual movement matters.

A fork is a tactic where one piece attacks two or more targets at once.

Put the king in check while also attacking the queen and the opponent may be forced to answer the check first.

Then the queen may fall.

That’s the danger.

One move.

Two problems.

The lyric calls it a “crooked move” because visually the knight doesn’t travel along the straight roads we associate with the other pieces.

That strange movement is its identity.

What looks awkward becomes its advantage.

DARK AND LIGHT

“My bishops cut diagonal lines
1 on the dark 1 on the light”

Now we move from jumping to slicing across the board.

A bishop remains on the same colour complex for the entire game.

A bishop that begins on a light square will always travel on light squares.

The other remains on dark squares.

Neither bishop can do the other’s job.

That limitation creates their identity.

“Corner to corner they watch their lane
Open an angle & feel the pain”

A bishop can become enormously effective when diagonals open.

Sometimes the danger is sitting across the board waiting for one pawn or piece to move.

Remove that obstruction and suddenly the line appears.

The attack wasn’t created from nowhere.

It was revealed.

That idea matters later when the final mating net begins to close.

Remember the bishop.

We’re going to need it again.

CASTLE WALLS

“My rooks stand strong like castle walls
Up & down across it all
Rank & file they own the road
Clear their path & watch them go”

The rook changes the geometry again.

Ranks run horizontally across the board.

Files run vertically.

The rook travels along both.

But the final line is the key:

“Clear their path.”

Power needs access.

A rook buried behind pawns and pieces has potential, but limited activity.

Open a file and suddenly it has a road.

That is another reason chess fascinates me.

A piece doesn’t become powerful simply because the rulebook says it is powerful.

Its position determines what that power can actually accomplish.

There is a difference between having strength and being able to use it.

EVERY MANS DREAM

“Then comes my queen
Every mans dream”

I had some fun here.

This is a chess song with attitude, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

The queen gets the big entrance.

Then immediately we return to what makes her dangerous:

“Straight or diagonal fast & clean
Side to side wherever she needs”

Her reach can dominate a board.

But then I give her a responsibility:

“Protecting her king while taking ur team”

Power isn’t only attack.

Sometimes the most valuable thing a powerful piece can do is protect something more important than itself.

And there is the contradiction again.

The queen has greater mobility.

The king determines the game’s survival.

BACK TO THE CHORUS

The chorus returns here for a reason.

We’ve met the pawns.

We’ve watched the knights jump.

We’ve opened the bishops.

We’ve cleared roads for the rooks.

We’ve unleashed the queen.

After all that power, we return to the same instruction:

Protect the king.

The pieces are different.

The mission hasn’t changed.

DON’T FORGET WHO THIS WAR IS FOR

“Don’t forget who this war is for
The king moves 1 square nothing more”

Now the song finally turns directly toward the king.

After all the excitement surrounding the queen, the king almost sounds disappointing.

One square.

That’s it.

He can move one square in any direction, provided the destination is legal and does not place him in check.

“Forward backward side to side
Diagonal too nowhere unsafe to hide”

He has movement in every direction, but limited range.

Then comes the real point:

“He may be limited he may move slow
Lose ur king & the whole game goes”

Technically, chess ends at checkmate rather than with the physical capture of the king. The lyric uses “lose ur king” in the ordinary sense of losing the game because the king can no longer escape the mating attack.

And once again we reach the central contradiction.

Limited movement.

Maximum importance.

Never confuse power with value.

BUILD THE FORTRESS

“Castle him early rook by his side
2 pieces move & the king can hide”

Castling is unusual because the king and rook move as part of the same legal move, provided the required conditions are satisfied.

The king moves toward the rook and the rook crosses to the other side of the king.

The lyric isn’t trying to provide every castling rule.

It’s capturing the purpose.

Safety.

Development.

Connection between king and rook.

“Build a fortress guard every square
1 careless move & check is there”

Protection is not something you think about only after danger arrives.

Sometimes you build it before you need it.

That’s true on a chessboard.

I’ll let the reader decide where else it might be true.

THIS IS MY KINGDOM

“This is my kingdom Im making my claim
There aint no dice in a thinking mans game”

Now the confidence returns.

By this point the board has developed.

The pieces have identities.

The battle is underway.

And the song reminds us again that chess is not driven by a dice roll.

You make the decisions.

Your opponent makes theirs.

That doesn’t mean the strongest player wins every game or that mistakes disappear.

It means chance is not deciding how many squares your piece gets to move.

The responsibility remains with the players.

EVERY MOVE HAS REASON

“Every move has reason every piece a place
Every square I control takes ur space”

This is what strategy feels like when it starts working.

One piece supports another.

A square becomes unavailable.

A file becomes controlled.

An escape route disappears.

The opponent’s position gets smaller without the board physically shrinking.

That is important.

The board still has 64 squares.

But not every square is usable.

Control changes freedom.

Now we’re getting close to the ending.

SOMETIMES LOSING IS HOW U WIN

“Trade a pawn sacrifice a


knight. Give up a rook if the timing is rite”

Here the song asks the listener to stop counting pieces for a moment.

Suppose I give you a rook.

Did I lose?

Maybe.

Maybe I made a terrible move.

Or maybe taking that rook forces your king somewhere I already wanted it to go.

The sacrifice cannot be judged only by what disappeared.

You have to look at what happened next.

That’s why the next two lines are among the most important in the song:

“Sometimes U lose to pull them in
Sometimes losing is how U win”

That doesn’t mean every loss is secretly a victory.

Sometimes losing is simply losing.

I don’t believe in pretending otherwise.

The point is that a deliberate sacrifice can make sense when it serves a larger strategy.

And life sometimes asks the same uncomfortable question.

What are you willing to give up for something that matters more?

Time?

Comfort?

Pride?

Money?

An argument you could probably win but don’t need to?

The chessboard gives us the question.

Our lives decide the answer.

Now we return immediately to the opponent.

YOU TRIED TO MESS WITH MY MIND

“Sit down try to mess with my mind
you’ve looked ahead but ur out of time”

Remember how this journey began?

The challenge.

The chair.

The two minds.

We’re back there now.

Only the position has changed.

“U set ur traps U tried ur tricks”

The opponent wasn’t passive.

They fought.

They planned.

They tried.

That matters because victory means more when the other person actually had a chance to challenge you.

Then comes the reveal:

“I’ve built this since move #6”

Now we discover that what looks like an ending may have begun much earlier.

The final attack isn’t necessarily something I invented one move ago.

Pieces have been moving toward this.

Squares have been controlled.

Lines have been opened.

Escape routes have been disappearing.

The trap has been under construction.

LOOK AT UR BOARD

“Look at ur board see what remains
Ur king has nowhere to escape”

This is the moment when calculation becomes reality.

Look.

Don’t listen to me.

Look at the board.

Where can the king go?

Then the earlier pieces return one by one.

“My rook owns the file my bishop the lane”

Remember the rook?

Remember the bishop?

The song taught us how they move earlier because now their movement matters.

The rook controls its line.

The bishop controls the diagonal.

Then:

“My knight  took the square U thought was safe”

The strange L-shaped piece we met earlier has removed another possibility.

The ending is bringing the whole song together.

Rook.

Bishop.

Knight.

Controlled squares.

Limited king.

And then the piece we’ve been waiting for:

“My queen moves in”

Everything stops.

CHECK

“Check”

One word.

After all those lyrics, I wanted space here.

Check means answer the threat.

The king cannot remain in check.

So look.

Calculate.

Find the defence.

The song gives the opponent that final opportunity.

“Look again”

Maybe you missed something.

Look again.

“No square left”

The roads are closing.

“No piece can defend”

No rescue.

“No place to run”

The king’s limited movement now becomes fatal.

“This is the end”

And finally:

“Checkmate”

That’s it.

No need for another explanation.

When the king is checkmated, the game is over.

The battle that began with a challenge has reached its answer.

But the song has four final lines before the chorus returns.

64 SQUARES

“64 squares
32 came
1 king standing
Thats the game”

We finish where we started.

Sixty-four squares.

Thirty-two pieces at the beginning.

Two minds.

Two sides.

One board.

The song travelled through every major piece. It showed attack, defence, development, sacrifice, promotion, control, deception, preparation and finally checkmate.

But underneath all of it was one instruction that never changed.

You can attack.

You can sacrifice.

You can build traps.

You can unleash your queen.

You can control files.

You can dominate diagonals.

You can think three moves ahead.

But don’t become so impressed with your attack that you forget what the entire battle depends on.

That is why the song returns one final time to the chorus.

Protect the king.

 

SECTION FOUR

REFLECTION

WHEN THE BOARD GOES QUIET

There is a moment after a chess game ends when everything changes.

A few seconds earlier, every square mattered.

You were calculating.

Watching.

Attacking.

Defending.

Trying to figure out what the other person was doing.

Then comes checkmate.

And suddenly the board goes quiet.

The pieces are still sitting there, but the battle is finished.

I think that is where PROTECT THE KING leaves us.

Not with the queen.

Not with the rook.

Not even with checkmate.

It leaves us with decisions.

Because when you look back across a finished chess game, the ending is only the last consequence of everything that happened before it.

THE LAST MOVE DIDN’T CREATE THE WHOLE GAME

It is easy to look at checkmate and think that was the move that won the game.

Sometimes the real turning point happened much earlier.

Maybe it was a pawn move.

Maybe somebody lost control of an important square.

Maybe a king stayed exposed too long.

Maybe a knight found the perfect position.

Maybe somebody accepted a sacrifice without asking why it was being offered.

Maybe the final attack was already developing while both players were paying attention somewhere else.

That is why I put this line into the song:

“Ive built this since move #6”

I like what that line says beyond chess.

Results often have histories.

We see the moment something succeeds and call it success.

We see the moment something collapses and call it failure.

But sometimes the real story started months or years earlier.

A good decision kept being repeated.

A bad habit kept being ignored.

A skill kept being practised.

A relationship kept being neglected.

A person kept learning.

A problem kept growing.

Then one day everybody notices the result.

The result may be new.

The road that created it isn’t.

LOOK AT THE WHOLE BOARD

Chess teaches you to look beyond the piece directly in front of you.

That sounds simple.

It isn’t always simple in life.

Sometimes one problem becomes so large in our minds that it becomes the entire board.

We stare at it.

We react to it.

We make decisions around it.

Meanwhile, something else is changing on the other side.

Chess punishes tunnel vision.

If I become obsessed with attacking your queen, I may forget what you’re doing to my king.

If I’m concentrating only on what I want, I can miss what you’re preparing.

That is why one of the simplest lessons I take from this song is also one of the most useful:

Look at the whole board.

Not just the threat.

Not just the prize.

Not just the thing making the most noise.

What else is happening?

EVERY PIECE HAS DIFFERENT VALUE

One thing I enjoy about chess is that the pieces aren’t equal in the way they move, yet every one of them can matter.

The queen gets attention because she is powerful.

The rook dominates open lines.

The bishop can reach across a diagonal.

The knight attacks in that strange L shape.

The pawn moves slowly and spends most of the game looking like the least impressive piece on the board.

Then that pawn reaches the other end.

Promotion.

Suddenly the piece somebody ignored can become a queen.

I think people do this to each other all the time.

We look at somebody’s position today and decide that’s who they are.

Maybe they’re starting late.

Maybe they’re struggling.

Maybe they’re learning something everybody else learned years ago.

Maybe nobody is paying attention to them.

That doesn’t tell you where they will finish.

I’ve learned enough in my own life to know that where somebody begins doesn’t necessarily tell you what they are capable of becoming.

Never underestimate the pawn.

DIFFERENT DOESN’T MEAN USELESS

The knight may be my favourite example of this.

It doesn’t move like anything else.

If you judged it by the rules of a rook, it would be terrible.

If you expected it to behave like a bishop, it would disappoint you.

But that would be your mistake.

Not the knight’s.

Its value comes from understanding what it actually does.

I think there is something worth carrying from that.

People aren’t all built the same.

Some think differently.

Some learn differently.

Some solve problems differently.

Some take roads that make absolutely no sense to the person standing beside them.

Different doesn’t automatically mean wrong.

Sometimes the thing that makes somebody unusual is exactly what allows them to reach a square nobody else can.

POWER AND IMPORTANCE ARE NOT THE SAME THING

The queen is the wrecking machine in this song.

I wanted her that way.

She is fast, dangerous and capable of attacking in almost every direction.

Then there is the king.

One square.

That’s the funny contradiction at the centre of chess.

The queen has greater mobility.

The king carries the consequence.

That made me think about the difference between being powerful and being important.

They aren’t always the same thing.

The loudest person isn’t automatically the most important.

The person with the most money isn’t automatically the most valuable.

The thing receiving the most attention isn’t necessarily the thing that needs the most protection.

Sometimes the most important things in our lives are actually quiet.

Family.

Trust.

Health.

Time.

Reputation.

Peace of mind.

The people we love.

Whatever your own king represents, you probably have something that deserves protecting.

The important part is knowing what it is before somebody puts it in check.

THERE AIN’T NO DICE

“There ain’t no dice in a thinking mans game”

I keep coming back to that line because responsibility is hiding inside it.

Life certainly contains luck and circumstances we cannot control. I would never pretend otherwise.

Chess is different.

There are no dice determining how far my rook moves.

But even chess contains something that feels very familiar to life.

I don’t control your move.

I control mine.

That’s an important distinction.

We spend a lot of time trying to control things that belong to somebody else.

Their opinions.

Their decisions.

Their reactions.

Their behaviour.

Their choices.

Sometimes all we can really control is what we do next.

Chess keeps asking that question after every move:

All right.

That happened.

Now what are you going to do?

SOMETIMES LOSING IS HOW U WIN

This may be the line that travels furthest beyond the board:

“Sometimes losing is how U win”

I don’t mean that every loss should be dressed up as some beautiful victory.

I’ve had losses in life.

Real losses.

Things hurt.

Things disappear.

Some doors close and never reopen.

Calling every painful experience a hidden blessing can become dishonest.

That isn’t what this lyric means.

On a chessboard, sacrifice has a purpose.

You give something up because you believe what comes next is worth more.

That is the lesson.

Sometimes moving forward requires giving something up.

Pride.

Comfort.

A bad habit.

A fight that isn’t worth continuing.

A way of thinking that no longer works.

Something familiar that is keeping you from reaching somewhere better.

But sacrifice needs a reason.

Otherwise it isn’t strategy.

It’s just loss.

DON’T CONFUSE MOVEMENT WITH PROGRESS

Chess also reminds me that moving isn’t the same as improving your position.

Every turn requires a move.

Not every move is good.

Life can become like that.

We stay busy.

We answer messages.

We run around.

We start things.

We stop things.

We make noise.

At the end of the day we feel exhausted and assume that means we accomplished something.

Maybe we did.

Maybe we just moved pieces.

There is a difference.

Sometimes the smartest move is quiet.

Sometimes preparation doesn’t look impressive.

Sometimes protecting what you already have matters more than chasing something new.

The board doesn’t reward movement.

It rewards good decisions.

YOUR OPPONENT IS NOT ALWAYS YOUR ENEMY

There is another thing I think chess gets right.

The person sitting across from you is your opponent.

For that game.

They don’t have to become your enemy.

You can compete hard.

You can try to outthink each other.

You can set traps.

You can attack.

You can fight over every important square.

Then the game ends.

You shake hands.

Maybe you talk about where one of you went wrong.

Maybe you set the pieces up and play again.

We could probably use more of that outside chess.

Disagreement doesn’t have to become hatred.

Competition doesn’t have to become personal destruction.

Somebody can challenge you without becoming somebody you need to despise.

Sometimes the person who beats you teaches you more than the person you beat.

LOSING CAN TEACH YOU TO SEE

Winning feels good.

Losing can be useful.

After a loss, you can blame the opponent.

You can blame yourself.

You can get angry.

Or you can look at the board.

Where did it change?

What did I miss?

What did they see?

Was I too aggressive?

Did I fail to develop something?

Did I ignore my king?

Did I take something I shouldn’t have taken?

Did I have a better move?

That kind of reflection isn’t about beating yourself up.

It’s about learning.

If I make the same mistake twenty times and refuse to examine it, the problem isn’t that chess is unfair.

At some point I have to look at my own moves.

That lesson can become uncomfortable outside the game.

It can also become valuable.

WHAT ARE YOU PROTECTING?

That is the question I want to leave sitting on the board.

Not:

Are you good at chess?

Not:

Could you beat me?

Not even:

Who is your favourite piece?

The question is:

What is your king?

What matters enough in your life that everything else should sometimes be organized around protecting it?

Your family?

Your future?

Your integrity?

Your peace?

Your creativity?

Your freedom?

Your relationships?

Your time?

Your name?

Maybe you have more than one answer.

That’s fine.

Life isn’t actually a chessboard.

There isn’t one universal piece everybody must protect.

But I think there is value in knowing what matters most to you.

Because if you don’t know what your king is, you may spend your whole life protecting pawns while something far more important is left exposed.

AND WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO SACRIFICE?

The second question is harder.

What can you let go?

Chess pieces exist to serve the position.

People aren’t chess pieces, and life isn’t a game where we should treat people as disposable. I want to make that distinction clear.

The useful comparison is about priorities and choices.

Sometimes we hold onto things simply because we’ve had them for a long time.

An idea.

A grudge.

A habit.

A fear.

A way of seeing ourselves.

Maybe keeping it costs more than releasing it.

A good chess player doesn’t say, “I can never lose a rook.”

They ask what the position requires.

Maybe there is something in our own lives worth examining the same way.

Not because everything should be sacrificed.

Because everything should occasionally be questioned.

THINK BEFORE YOU MOVE

If PROTECT THE KING leaves one simple thought behind, maybe it is this:

Think before you move.

You won’t always get it right.

Neither will I.

Nobody sees every consequence.

Nobody lives five moves ahead all the time.

But we can learn to look a little further.

We can ask better questions.

We can stop before reacting.

We can consider what our decision opens and what it closes.

We can understand what we’re protecting.

We can recognize when we’re being pulled into somebody else’s trap.

We can learn from the moves that went wrong.

Then we make another move.

That’s life.

RESET THE PIECES

The beautiful thing about a chess game is that after checkmate, eventually somebody puts the pieces back.

The captured pieces return.

The pawns go home.

The queen comes back.

The kings return to their starting squares.

The board is reset.

Same 64 squares.

Same 32 pieces.

Completely new game.

Life doesn’t always give us that kind of perfect reset.

Some consequences remain.

Some losses cannot be restored.

But tomorrow still gives us another move.

Sometimes that’s enough.

I wrote PROTECT THE KING because I enjoy chess, because it became part of my experience during incarceration, because I like the mental battle inside it, and because once I started looking at those pieces as a songwriter, I saw much more than a game.

I saw patience.

Strategy.

Consequences.

Sacrifice.

Potential.

Different kinds of strength.

The danger of arrogance.

The importance of preparation.

And the responsibility that comes with every move we choose to make.

If you came here because you liked the song, I hope you leave hearing something more inside it.

Maybe you’ll look at a chessboard differently.

Maybe you’ll play a game.

Maybe you’ll teach somebody else.

Or maybe you’ll never touch a chess piece and you’ll simply carry one question with you:

What is important enough in my life that I need to protect it before somebody says check?

Thank you for walking across these 64 squares with me.

The pieces can go back in the box now.

The lesson doesn’t have to.

MOITA
WHERE EVERY SONG TELLS A STORY
EVERY STORY TEACHES SOMETHING

 

SECTION FIVE

MOITA DOCUMENTARY & LEARNING CENTRE

BEYOND THE 64 SQUARES

If you have reached this point, the story of PROTECT THE KING is complete.

But chess certainly isn’t.

That little board of 64 squares has survived generation after generation because the rules can be learned relatively quickly while the possibilities created by those rules can keep a person thinking for a lifetime.

That is where I want this Learning Centre to go.

Not back through my lyrics again.

We’ve already made that journey.

Now I want to step outside the song and look at the world surrounding chess.

Where did this game come from?

Why has it survived?

Why can two people look at exactly the same position and see completely different possibilities?

Why does losing sometimes teach more than winning?

And why has chess found its way into homes, schools, clubs, tournaments and even correctional settings?

There is much more sitting on that board than I could ever fit into one song.

FIRST, LET’S GET THE BOARD RIGHT

Chess begins with an 8-by-8 board.

That gives us the 64 squares mentioned throughout PROTECT THE KING.

At the beginning of a standard game, White has 16 pieces and Black has 16 pieces, giving us the 32 pieces in the song. The official FIDE Laws of Chess describe the objective as placing the opponent’s king under attack in such a way that the opponent has no legal move to escape. That is checkmate, and the game ends immediately. (FIDE Rules Commission⁠)

One detail is worth clearing up because everyday language can make this confusing.

In chess, you don’t actually capture the king.

You checkmate it.

Once the king is attacked and there is no legal way to remove that threat, the game is over. FIDE’s rules specifically state that capturing the opponent’s king is not allowed. (FIDE Rules Commission⁠)

I like that.

The final capture never has to happen.

The board already knows.

THE KING: LIMITED BUT EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON HIM

The king is one of the strangest pieces when you think about it.

He normally moves only to an adjoining square.

Compare that with the queen, which can travel long distances when her path is open, and the king can look weak.

Yet everything revolves around him.

That creates one of the most interesting distinctions in chess:

Mobility is not the same thing as importance.

You can continue after losing your queen.

You can continue after losing both rooks.

You can continue after losing bishops, knights and pawns.

Checkmate your king and nothing else matters.

The game is finished. (FIDE Rules Commission⁠)

That’s one reason Protect the King was such a natural title.

It isn’t just something I invented to make the chorus sound powerful.

It is the fundamental objective around which the entire game is built.

THE QUEEN: POWER NEEDS SPACE

The queen is usually the piece beginners fall in love with.

I understand why.

Look at what she can do.

She can move along ranks.

Files.

Diagonals.

As far as an unobstructed line permits.

Put her in the right position and she can influence an enormous part of the board.

But that power comes with a warning.

A queen badly positioned can become a target.

Bring her into battle carelessly and your opponent can attack her while developing their own pieces.

That teaches something chess returns to constantly:

Power is only useful when it is used properly.

Having the strongest piece does not automatically give you the strongest position.

THE PAWN: DON’T JUDGE THE BEGINNING BY THE END

The pawn may contain one of the greatest ideas in chess.

It begins small.

Its movement is limited.

It moves forward and normally captures diagonally forward.

It cannot simply reverse direction.

But get that pawn all the way to the final rank and promotion changes everything.

Under FIDE rules, a pawn reaching the promotion rank is exchanged for a queen, rook, bishop or knight of the same colour, and the effect of the new piece is immediate. (FIDE Rules Commission⁠)

Notice something important.

It doesn’t have to become a queen.

A player may choose another eligible piece when the position calls for it.

That is another beautiful part of chess.

The obvious choice isn’t automatically the correct choice in every possible position.

Context matters.

WHY THE KNIGHT FEELS SO DIFFERENT

The knight changes the way a beginner sees the board.

Rooks create straight lines.

Bishops create diagonals.

Queens combine those long-range movements.

Then the knight arrives with that strange L-shaped jump.

It doesn’t need the road between its starting square and destination to be empty.

That makes it tactically unusual.

A knight fork is a perfect example.

One knight can attack multiple pieces simultaneously. If one of those targets is the king, the opponent must deal with the check, potentially leaving another valuable piece vulnerable.

That is why knights can create surprises.

Not because their movement is random.

It isn’t.

Their movement is completely defined.

The surprise comes because their geometry is different.

BISHOPS AND THE COLOUR THEY CAN NEVER LEAVE

A bishop begins on either a light or dark square and remains on that colour complex throughout the game.

Think about that limitation.

A light-squared bishop can never directly occupy a dark square.

Yet from the right position, that same bishop can influence a diagonal stretching across much of the board.

Chess repeatedly does this.

It gives a piece a limitation and then asks the player to discover the strength inside that limitation.

That is a concept worth thinking about beyond chess too.

We often spend enormous amounts of energy concentrating on what we cannot do.

Chess asks a different question:

Given what this piece can do, where does it belong?

That’s a much more useful question.

ROOKS NEED ROADS

Rooks travel horizontally and vertically along ranks and files when their paths are clear.

That is why open files become so important to rook activity.

A rook trapped behind its own pieces may possess theoretical power but have very little practical influence.

Open the road and everything changes.

There is another lesson hiding there.

Ability and opportunity aren’t identical.

You can possess enormous ability and still need the right conditions to use it.

Sometimes improvement isn’t about becoming stronger.

Sometimes it’s about clearing the road.

CASTLING: TWO PIECES, ONE MOVE

Castling is one of the most unusual moves in standard chess.

It involves the king and one rook and counts as a single king move. Under the official rules, the king moves two squares toward the rook, and the rook moves to the square the king crossed. Castling is legal only when its required conditions are satisfied. (FIDE Rules Commission⁠)

That’s the technical side.

The strategic idea is easier to understand.

Get the king safer.

Bring the rook into greater participation.

One move can help accomplish both.

I like the concept because it demonstrates something that appears everywhere in good strategy:

A strong decision can solve more than one problem.

CHECK IS NOT CHECKMATE

These two words are sometimes treated as though they mean almost the same thing.

They don’t.

Check means the king is under attack.

The player must respond legally to that threat.

Checkmate means the king is under attack and the threat cannot be parried. The game ends. (FIDE Rules Commission⁠)

That difference is the reason I slowed the ending of the song down.

Check.

Look again.

Is there a square?

Can something block?

Can something capture?

Is there a defence?

If the answer disappears one possibility at a time, then we reach:

Checkmate.

NOT EVERY GAME ENDS WITH A WINNER

This is important because PROTECT THE KING naturally drives toward checkmate.

Real chess games don’t always finish that way.

Chess can also end in a draw.

One example is a position where neither player can possibly checkmate the opponent’s king through any legal series of moves. The FIDE Laws classify such a position as a draw. (FIDE Rules Commission⁠)

There are other drawing mechanisms and rules as well.

That opens another interesting part of chess for somebody beginning to learn.

Winning isn’t the only result you need to understand.

Sometimes recognizing that a losing position can be saved is itself a skill.

CHESS IS A LANGUAGE

Once people get deeper into chess, they discover that the game has its own language.

Files are identified by letters.

Ranks by numbers.

Squares therefore have names.

Moves can be recorded.

Castling has notation.

Captures can be identified.

Check and checkmate have symbols.

FIDE’s notation standards, for example, use + for check and allow ++ or # for checkmate. Kingside castling is represented as 0-0, while queenside castling is 0-0-0. (FIDE Rules Commission⁠)

That means a chess game doesn’t have to disappear when the pieces are put away.

It can be recorded.

Replayed.

Studied.

Questioned.

You can return to the exact moment everything changed.

For somebody interested in learning from mistakes, that is incredibly valuable.

WHY ANALYSIS MATTERS

Imagine losing a game.

You know the ending.

You got checkmated.

That tells you what happened.

It doesn’t necessarily tell you why.

Maybe the decisive mistake occurred twenty moves earlier.

That is why analysing a completed game can be so useful.

Instead of saying:

“I lost.”

You can ask:

Where did my position begin getting worse?

Maybe you missed a tactic.

Maybe you weakened your king.

Maybe you traded the wrong piece.

Maybe you had a strong move and didn’t recognize it.

Maybe your opponent simply played better.

Analysis turns the finished game into information.

And information gives you something you can use the next time.

LOSING WITHOUT MAKING EXCUSES

This may be one of the hardest lessons in any competitive activity.

You lose.

Now what?

You can blame everything around you.

Or you can learn.

That doesn’t mean every loss is entirely your fault in every part of life. Life is far more complicated than chess, and circumstances can absolutely matter.

But on the chessboard, your own decisions are available for examination.

That creates accountability.

What did I miss?

What could I have done differently?

What should I recognize next time?

Those aren’t questions designed to make somebody feel stupid.

They are how improvement begins.

CHESS AND EDUCATION

Chess has also become an educational tool.

FIDE has a dedicated Chess in Education Commission focused on using chess in learning environments. Its educational work connects chess with intellectual, academic, life and broader 21st-century skills, and it supports teacher training and school programs internationally. FIDE designated 2026 as its Year of Chess in Education, with an initiative aimed at expanding educational chess globally. (FIDE EDU⁠)

That interests me because it shows how far the game can travel beyond competition.

A child doesn’t have to become a grandmaster for chess to have value.

The board can simply become a place to practise thinking.

FIDE’s educational materials also describe connections between educational chess and areas such as mathematics, communication and language development, while emphasizing an enjoyable and collaborative learning environment. (FIDE EDU⁠)

That’s a very different picture from two grandmasters silently battling for a world championship.

Same board.

Different purpose.

CHESS CAN BECOME CULTURE AND ART

There is another side of chess that deserves attention.

The game has travelled far beyond tournament halls.

Chess sets become works of art.

Historic games become stories.

Great players become part of cultural history.

The board appears in paintings, films, literature, photography and design.

The World Chess Hall of Fame exists in part to preserve and interpret the history and cultural significance of chess. Its exhibitions have explored the game’s connections with history, art and creative thought. (World Chess Hall of Fame & Galleries⁠)

That tells me something about the durability of the game.

People aren’t only interested in who won.

They’re interested in what chess represents.

CHESS IN UNEXPECTED PLACES

This part connects particularly strongly with my own story.

Chess can survive in places where people have very little.

You don’t need an enormous field.

You don’t need expensive machinery.

You don’t need a team of twenty people.

You need a board, pieces and somebody willing to sit across from you.

That helps explain why chess can appear in settings people might not immediately think about.

FIDE’s Chess in Education partnerships even reference Chess for Freedom activities involving participating institutions and prisons. (FIDE EDU⁠)

That caught my attention for obvious reasons.

My connection to chess came through incarceration.

So when I look back now and see organized chess initiatives reaching correctional environments, the idea makes sense to me.

Inside confinement, the mind still needs somewhere to travel.

A chessboard can give it 64 squares.

Sometimes that’s enough to keep a person thinking.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THINKING AHEAD AND PREDICTING THE FUTURE

There is one idea from the song that deserves a little more attention here:

“Think 3 moves ahead or fall behind.”

Thinking ahead doesn’t mean predicting the future perfectly.

You can’t.

Your opponent is making decisions too.

Planning means considering possibilities.

If I do this, what are the strongest responses?

If they answer this way, what can I do next?

What changes?

What becomes vulnerable?

What becomes possible?

That is a much healthier understanding of planning than pretending we can control everything.

The same distinction matters in life.

Planning isn’t fortune-telling.

It is preparation.

You imagine reasonable possibilities so you’re less surprised when one of them arrives.

STRATEGY IS NOT THE SAME AS A TRICK

A trick hopes somebody doesn’t notice something.

A strategy still needs to make sense even when the opponent is thinking.

That’s an important difference.

Beginners often love traps because they’re exciting.

And traps can absolutely work.

But stronger chess requires more than hoping the other person makes a mistake.

You develop pieces.

Control useful squares.

Protect your king.

Coordinate your forces.

Improve your position.

Then if a tactical opportunity appears, you’re ready for it.

That is one reason the final attack in PROTECT THE KING says:

“I’ve built this since move #6”

The checkmate is dramatic.

The preparation is what made it possible.

WHAT CHESS CANNOT TEACH US

I also think we should be careful whenever we compare chess with life.

The comparison has limits.

Human beings are not pieces.

People should not be treated as disposable pawns.

Relationships are not battles to be won.

Life doesn’t begin with everybody receiving identical circumstances.

Real people face inequalities, accidents, illnesses, opportunities, losses and events they never chose.

Chess is much cleaner than life.

That is exactly why it can be useful as a model.

It lets us isolate certain ideas.

Planning.

Patience.

Consequences.

Attention.

Sacrifice.

Adaptation.

Responsibility.

Then we take whatever is useful and leave the rest on the board.

TRY A DIFFERENT QUESTION

If you’re learning chess, don’t only ask:

What’s the best move?

Try asking:

What is my opponent threatening?

Which of my pieces isn’t doing anything?

Is my king safe?

What changed after the last move?

What squares have become weak?

What am I protecting?

What am I attacking?

If I make this move, what is the strongest answer against me?

Those questions slow the mind down.

And sometimes slowing down is exactly what prevents the mistake.

A BOARD THAT NEVER PLAYS THE SAME GAME TWICE

The physical board doesn’t change.

Eight squares by eight.

The pieces begin from their standard positions.

The rules remain recognizable.

Yet game after game can develop differently.

That’s creativity inside structure.

I understand that idea because it is close to how I look at MOITA.

The structure gives you somewhere to begin.

Creativity determines where you go.

A guitar has a limited number of strings.

A chessboard has a limited number of squares.

Language has a limited alphabet.

That doesn’t mean we have run out of songs, games or stories.

Limits don’t always kill creativity.

Sometimes they give creativity something to push against.

MAYBE THAT IS WHY CHESS SURVIVES

People change.

Technology changes.

Entertainment changes.

The world around us changes.

Yet somebody can still place 32 pieces on 64 squares, sit across from another person and begin.

White moves.

Black answers.

The battle starts again.

You don’t need to know everything about chess to enjoy that.

You don’t need to memorize thousands of openings.

Start with the pieces.

Learn what they do.

Learn what check means.

Learn what checkmate means.

Play.

Lose.

Win.

Make mistakes.

Ask why.

Play again.

That’s where learning begins.

And if PROTECT THE KING gets one person curious enough to sit down at a chessboard and discover that world for themselves, then the song has travelled beyond the music.

That is exactly what I want the MOITA Documentary & Learning Centre to do.

The song opens the door.

Curiosity decides how far you walk through it.

CONTINUE EXPLORING

For anyone who wants to continue beyond this page, I would start with resources that teach the game rather than simply tell you who won the latest tournament.

FIDE Laws of Chess⁠ — The official rules are the best place to check exactly how the pieces move, how castling and promotion work, what constitutes checkmate, and how games can end.

FIDE Chess in Education Commission⁠ — A useful doorway into the educational side of chess and how the game is being used in learning environments around the world.

World Chess Hall of Fame⁠ — For readers interested in the history, culture, art and people surrounding chess, this is a natural direction to continue exploring.

From there, try exploring the history of chess, famous matches, chess notation, opening principles, tactical patterns, endgames, pawn promotion, castling, forks, pins, discovered attacks, sacrifices and the lives of great players.

But don’t spend all your time reading.

Set up a board.

Take your seat.

Pick your side.

Make mistakes.

Learn from them.

And when you finally think you’ve got your opponent exactly where you want them, remember the instruction that started this entire journey:

Protect the king.

MOITA

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