Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.

A very strong player can manage and can just know how to manage a thousand positions. I get it; it's a very arbitrary number. So then you have the world champion who could do more. But, again, any increase in numbers creates, sort of, a new level of playing. And then you go to the very top, and the difference is so minimal, but it does exist. So even a few players who never became world champion, like Vassily Ivanchuk, for instance, I think they belong to the same category.

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.

Everyone is concerned about his niche, his name, and wants to adapt the concept to so-called national characteristics. But at the end of the day, it's all the same.

I would like to travel to my country again, to a country without a dictatorship, to a post-Putin Russia.

I don't have enough information, and enough courage, to come up with a definite version of events. And I think it is too dangerous for me to do so.

Once I spoke about this subject among a group of English intellectuals. One of them was a professor on Roman Law at one of the leading British universities. I asked him,what was the official language of the Byzantine Empire? He said, maybe sometime in the sixth or the seventh century.The Justinian Codex, the rule of law in the Byzantine Empire which was produced by Emperor Justinian, it was written in Latin.And he looked at me ,he knew that I knew already that the only original copy was found in the beginning of the sixteenth century.