Your Move: Chess, Cults & Choosing Purpose

An exclusive excerpt from chess International Master and cult survivor Danny Rensch

Greetings, Fellow Players of the Infinite Game of Life!

This week on the Soul Boom Podcast, we welcome a truly singular mind — the chess great Danny Rensch.

Without a doubt, chess is definitely Danny’s superpower. His brilliant mind fell in love with the game’s mysteries and mastered them at the highest level. To understand what attracted him to chess to begin with, there’s no better place to begin than Danny’s distilled description of chess and its evolving place in the human story. The following is excerpted from Danny’s new book Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life:

“The earliest version of chess was a game called chaturanga, which was played in India going back to 600 AD. From there the game moved west across the Middle East with the conquests of the Persian armies and Alexander the Great. Many centuries later, the game made its way into western Europe, and as many stories then tell, it was in Spain in the 1400s that Queen Isabella, who at the time you could argue was the most powerful person on the planet, changed the rules. Where originally the king and queen had been the same type of piece moving one square at a time, Isabella decided that the queen would be the most powerful piece on the board, transforming the game into what we know it as today.

Since that time, chess has become a game that represents more than itself. It has come to serve as a reflection of who we are and what it means to be human. In the Romantic era, chess was a game of intuition and beauty, played with bold sacrifices and grand, sweeping attacks. During the Industrial Revolution, the game became highly technical and mechanical; strategies were executed with the precision of a Swiss watch. When the Americans and the Soviets squared off during the Cold War, chess became a symbol of raw intellectual prowess. Then, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, chess mutated once more, becoming a metaphor for mankind’s changing relationship with computers and artificial intelligence. Two hundred years from now, chess will transform itself yet again, becoming an embodiment of whatever’s next.

Chess is a subject of endless fascination because the game itself is endless. It is a game of defined information: sixty-four squares, thirty-two pieces, and zero luck. And yet nobody has ever “solved” it. Even now, the best players in the world will never master everything there is to know about it. We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t solve chess. And yet: we know the answer is there. The solution to the perfect strategy and the perfect game, that answer exists somewhere in those sixty-four squares.

Yet we’ll likely never find it.

And in that way, chess is like life, and life is like chess. There’s something about it that makes people feel part of something that’s crazy and interesting and beautiful.”

But here’s the paradox: the very thing that empowered Danny also threatened to undo him.

And this might strike as an odd comparison, but in this way, his story echoes one of the most poignant in comic book history: The Death of Captain Marvel.

The original Captain Marvel of Marvel Comics — not the later Earthling incarnation played by Brie Larson, but the original Kree space warrior — wore the Nega-Bands: shiny cosmic wrist-cuffs that turned thought into super-punches. Pretty handy when you’re fending off galactic despots.

Detail of the cover of The Death of Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin.

But in the weird, cruel irony department, the very thing that kept him alive and cosmic was also what doomed him. Years earlier, Mar-Vell went toe-to-toe with Nitro, one of his arch-nemeses. Nitro cracked open a container of deadly nerve gas that threatened to wipe out everyone in the area.

Mar-Vell did the only thing he could: he rushed in, sealed the canister, and sucked the toxic blast into his Nega-Bands — literally saving humanity from a poison cloud of doom.

Here’s the twist: the exposure left him with cancer buried deep in his cells. And instead of helping, the Nega-Bands trapped the poison inside.

When Reed Richards and Tony Stark — the two biggest brainiacs in the Marvel Universe — finally ran the tests, they explained that the very thing keeping him alive was also killing him: the cancer-causing, life-giving Nega-Bands.

And so the first Marvel graphic novel ever published ended not in an intergalactic slugfest, but with a hero in a hospital bed, surrounded by friends, saying goodbye. A guy who could battle Thanos couldn’t out-punch his own mortality.

Which brings us to Danny. The cult he grew up in functioned like Nega-Bands. It empowered him — gave him identity, drive, and a platform for his genius. But it also entrapped and harmed him, wrapping its energy around him in ways that poisoned his spirit.

Unlike Mar-Vell, though, Danny survived. He lived to tell the tale. And the telling of it is raw, haunting, and — in the end — luminous. And the lessons he has to share about that journey are sobering. While it’s more than we can share in a single Dispatch, here’s an abridged excerpt from Danny’s memoir that gives us a sense of how he began to disentangle himself from what he calls “THE BIG LIE”:

In the Hollywood version of leaving a cult, the victim of the nefarious cult leader typically comes to some sudden epiphany about the ways they’ve been abused, and then they begin what feels like a daring, high-stakes prison escape, something akin to Igor Ivanov running from the KGB in a Canadian airport. Or their friends and family stage a daring intervention, hatch some type of secret midnight kidnapping of their loved one, and drive away before they get caught.

That wasn’t my experience. Nor do I think that’s what happens for most people in cults.

The reality is that it takes years, and morally speaking, it’s a murky and gray process. Ultimately, the glue that holds a cult together is not the abuse and exploitation that comes from the top. It’s the abuse and exploitation that the members inflict on each other. The hive becomes self-policing, which I can see now is what the Processes were largely about. As I’ve educated myself on the topic of religious groups practicing occult beliefs over the years, I’ve learned that almost every group you’d classify as a cult has some variation on the Process concept. Every single person who came and went from the Collective, at some point or another, either participated in or at least stood witness to some horrible injustice. In a cult, the victims are the perpetrators, and the perpetrators are the victims. So in the end, leaving is not about breaking free of your abuser’s control. It’s about reckoning with your own complicity in the abuse and exploitation that took place.

Learning to accept accountability in the Collective was nearly impossible. Because in the Church of Immortal Consciousness nobody ever grew up... People moved there as adults and gave away their power. Everyone tithed their money while surrendering their agency and responsibility, which meant that they always had someone to blame when their lives started going to shit. Since nobody was responsible for paying their own bills or raising their own kids, once it was time for everyone to answer for their own misdeeds, nobody knew where to begin...

Danny (in yellow) with church leader Steven Kamp and other members of the Shelby school chess team. Photograph courtesy of Danny Rensch

The Big Lie at the heart of the Collective was that everyone’s Purpose... was your special reason for being in this world, whether it was chess or sports or ballet or fixing cars. Your Purpose was always something you did, and the doing of the thing, achieving perfection in the thing, was what gave you fulfillment in life, and you would keep living your lifetimes over and over again until you achieved that perfection, which was why God put you here, and also why any impediments to that path had to be removed from your life.

But that’s wrong.

What I learned... is that your purpose is not something you do or a goal you achieve. It is not the thing that you do in order to achieve your perfect self. Real purpose is something you have. It’s something you find inside of what you do. It’s the reason why you do the thing, not the thing itself. Yes, there can be self-centered reasons for pursuing a goal, the satisfaction of mastering a craft or the inner growth that comes from challenging yourself. But the principal reason why we do anything in this world should always be to help something greater than ourselves. To serve others, to bring joy.

I believed in the Big Lie at the start of my chess career because it worked. I believed in the spiritual mission. I believed that Steven Kamp was right. Believing in something with all your heart and soul can take you a long way, even if it turns out to be wrong. And at the beginning, my chess actually did serve a true purpose. It brought many people in the Collective together: I had my mother cheering me on, my Shelby School teammates riding side by side with me in victory, and the whole of Tonto Village thriving in the wake of our success.

Then I was taken from my mother. I was isolated from my teammates as my performance began to eclipse theirs…There was no longer any meaning behind me becoming a super grandmaster chess player. The only purpose was Kamp’s, and his purpose was never mine…I couldn’t see that I had any inherent worth or that the reason we do anything must be rooted in the good that we provide to the people in our lives.

Danny with a trophy bigger than himself. Photograph courtesy of Danny Rensch

So what was the Collective? Was it an honest mistake? A misreading of the Gospels? A sincere belief by Steven and Trina Kamp that nevertheless stemmed from misinterpretation of the entire existential concept of Purpose…?

Or was it simply a product of its time? So many New Age religions and sects that sprang up in the 1960s started as rejections of the oppressive, orthodox religious expressions of midcentury America. Groups like EST and the Landmark Forum have helped many people along their path to self-reflection, self-enlightenment, self-actualization. So was there a fundamental truth and inherent good behind the Collective that simply dissolved along the way?…

I don’t know.

What I do know is that one night during those rough months when Shauna and I were so unhappy and struggling, I got fed up with arguing and said, “I’m going to see Debby for a bit.” I went and found my mom, who was hanging out with Elizabeth and Geraldine, two of her friends from the Collective.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, “do you have any cigarettes?”

“Yeah, I do!” she said, sitting up with a jolt, a bright, big smile on her face.

We both realized at the same moment why she was so delighted by my asking for a smoke: it was the first time I had called her “Mom” in more than ten years.

“Do you wanna have a cigarette with me?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, frantically fishing for them now in her purse as though if she didn’t find them quickly, the moment might pass and I’d never call her “Mom” again. “I do, just hold on, I’ll find them!”

We went out to her porch swing and sat and had a smoke. I told her how much I was struggling. She let me vent, and just listened. Then, when I stopped talking, she took a deep breath and reminded me how much she loved and deeply trusted Shauna. Which reminded me how much I did, too.

The conversation itself wasn’t profound, but the fact that I was sitting with the woman who birthed me and had fought so hard to get me back and I was able to call my mother for the first time in over a decade felt amazing. I’ll never forget it. And the love and warmth I felt in that moment—in sharp contrast to the pain, anxiety, and heartaches I’d endured in my mother’s absence—says everything there is to say about the people who took me away from her.

After my wife and mother finally forced me to open my eyes, after the two most important women in my life started to unravel the damage done to me by the two most important men in my life, I finally began to claw my way back…

Danny and family in 2010

I surrendered to my wife. Shauna and the kids became my purpose, the “why” in everything that I did. Shauna and Nash and Warner and Hazel became the first people I prioritized above myself, and everything else expanded out from there.

I surrendered to Erik and Jay and Chess.com as well. I finally admitted that for all my talents, I had a long way to go. Chess.com was really beginning to grow, and I wanted to be the face of the company. But I didn’t know how. I asked Erik what I needed to do to be more successful, and he was direct: “You have to learn to appreciate the success of the whole team and not just yourself.”

Erik had more to add. “To be a leader is not just to accomplish and achieve on your own so you can see your name in lights. You’re great at that stuff, but if you want to jump a level as far as running the company, you have to start looking at the whole team as an extension of yourself. You have to think more about building an environment for others to be successful around you.”

When he told me that, there was still a part of me that wanted to say, “Do you see the comments on my videos, bro? People love me. Are you fuckin’ kidding me? I’m a superstar here.” Which was exactly the kind of ego Erik was talking about. But I didn’t say that. I listened. Just like I was finally listening at home.

That call with Erik proved to be the beginning of my understanding that, like chess, Chess.com is not my sole purpose, but the joy that I create for other people through this game and this company gives my life purpose and meaning. I felt fulfilled after that call for the first time in a long time. Everything I had been fighting for up to that point—trying to become the next Bobby Fischer and trying to become the most adored person in the eyes of Steven and Trina Kamp, or my father and Marlow, that drive to prove everyone wrong and get attention from the growing community on Chess.com—it all went away. And then, the craziest thing happened. The moment I let go, the moment I surrendered at home and to the idea of supporting the ecosystem around me from outside the spotlight, all the things I ever wanted started to click into place.”

Danny’s journey reminds us that sometimes the very things that empower us can also endanger us — and that breaking free is not a Hollywood escape, but a slow, painful, courageous untangling.

So let us return to where we began: the beauty of the game. It’s easy to see why Danny fell in love with chess. Sixty-four squares, thirty-two pieces — a finite board with defined moves. And still, the number of possible games is so astronomically huge it might as well be infinite. Its beauty lies in those uncountable plays that remain.

And just like chess, one of the profound joys of this earthly life is to return again and again to the same board, the same questions, the same struggles — and to see them with new eyes.

To discover, from countless possibilities, a winning line to our own personal, inner victory.

Your move, friends.

The Soul Boom Team

Danny Rensch is an International Master, commentator, and co-founder of Chess.com, the world’s largest online chess platform. At age 14, he became the youngest national master in Arizona history, a record that still stands. As Chess.com’s Chief Chess Officer, he has shaped some of the biggest events in the game, from online tournaments that reach millions to live broadcasts followed by fans across the globe. Known for his lively teaching style and in-depth commentary, he has helped make chess more accessible and entertaining to a new generation of players. In Dark Squares, Rensch tells the story of how chess was both his sanctuary and his struggle, tracing his path from prodigy through cult entanglement to resilience, renewal, and leadership in the modern chess world.