I started by raising my chess board up a bit to give myself a bit more room to play around. Next i created a more rounded shape for my Surrounding wood. Finally i wanted my wood to be more of an unfinished look so i set the diffuse to half of what it was and set the specularity to 0 since i don’t think a tree shines when light hits it 
Oh forgot to mention for the Mapping of the wood texture i went with generated and applied it to a cube shape to get the outcome of my wood grains. It looks pretty good for what i was looking for