The biggest problem I see among people who want to excel in chess – and in business and in life in general – is not trusting their instincts enough.

As for the eastern part of the former Soviet Union, the picture is rather uniform. Authoritarian structures prevail to differing extents. But we can still determine certain regularities, and the role of Russia is not to be underestimated. It is clear that we would have the same situation in Tajikistan and, let's say, Uzbekistan without the direct influence of Russia.

Thanks to the Polgars the adjective 'men's' before events and the 'affirmative action' women's titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms.

The most hopeful approach to peace in Ukraine is the Minsk Agreement, which includes Moscow.

Ukraine had quite serious impact on the many Russians. They could see that ordinary people in Ukraine which is a bordering state, very close to Russia, the people of this state are, they didn't want to tolerate anymore the power abuse by Ukrainian officials.

I'm not saying that George W. Bush did everything right. But even if you take a skeptical view of his Iraq war, [Barack] Obama made the more serious error of withdrawing his troops from Iraq early.

Chess - it's a nonmainstream game. And the irony is that when you look at Hollywood, it kept using chess as the symbol of intelligence for its heroes, for its top characters, all the time. So it's from "Casablanca" to "Harry Potter." You always have chess as a very important element to demonstrate intelligence, while in normal life people think it's just a weird intelligence - like AI.