At the northern border of Azerbaijan, Daghestan by no means contributes to the democratization of the Caucasus.

Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you're going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles.

We know that the governments in most of the successor states formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union are replaced through a process of regular elections.

By the time a player becomes a Grandmaster, almost all of his training time is dedicated to work on this first phase. The opening is the only phase that holds out the potential for true creativity and doing something entirely new.

It's true that in chess as in politics, fund-raising and glad-handing matter.

The technical phase can be boring because there is little opportunity for creavivity, for art. Boredom leads to complacency and mistakes.

The West can't come up with anything to deal with Moscow, except appeasement.