Can chess be bad for your health?

The quest memoir is a balky beast. To tame it as well as Canadian journalist Sasha Chapin does in “All the Wrong Moves,” you’ll need an obscure but preferably universal target of obsession — chess mastery, in his case — a vague discontent with your present existence, a lover or two, a guru and the globe-trotting freedom to pursue your quixotic quarry. Leaven the chase with comic doses of self-doubt, then sift out any epiphanies at odyssey’s end.

“It’s tricky to explain the appeal of chess to someone who doesn’t play,” Chapin concedes, yet he makes all the right moves in doing just that. The game’s “infinite tapestry” first hooked him when he joined his high school team in Toronto: Chapin fell so hard for the 64 squares that “it felt like a possession — like a spirit had slipped a long finger up through my spine, making me a marionette, pausing only briefly to ask, ‘You weren’t doing anything with this, were you?’”

That fascination spawned an addiction — Chapin’s nearly ruinous (see subtitle) two-year plunge down the rabbit hole of online blitz and live tournament chess. Mesmerized by the game’s “ecstatically various” combinations, he “spent almost all of my money, neglected my loved ones, and accumulated a few infections” to prepare for the Los Angeles Open, where Chapin (rated 1390) hoped to topple a player rated 2000.

Slow your roll there, board freak — didn’t the United States reach peak pawn when Bobby Fischer became world champ in 1972? Nope — chess commands the devotion of 600 million acolytes around the globe today, meaning one in 12 Earthlings play the game in some capacity.

Desperate to “figure out why I was so terrible,” our hero journeys to the chess mecca of St. Louis for enlightenment by koanspouting grandmaster Ben Finegold. The secret of chess, please? You must play as if you want the game to go on forever.

In the end Chapin ruins precisely nothing, unless you count a couple of botched writing assignments — one of which leads to love with his magazine editor. Realizing that a chess nut’s best move is simply not to make that fateful first one, he finds solace in the example of fellow melancholic Paul Morphy, who torched the chess world for two years in the 1850s before abandoning the game: “The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman,” Morphy once said. “The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.”