Quotes About Chess

I started playing chess when I was about 4 or 5 years old. It is very good for children to learn to play chess, because it helps them to develop their mental abilities. It also helps to consolidate a person's character, because as it happens both in life and in a chess game we have to make decisions constantly. In chess there is no luck and no excuses: everything is in your hands.

I was very lucky that while I was a chess player in a country where chess was not a big deal, I happened to be in the one city where there was a sprouting chess team: Chennai.

Bobby Fischer was hugely important for the American chess community because it put chess on the map - he made it possible for other chess players to make a living.

The essence of Chess is thinking about what Chess is.

For young players, their minds are not overloaded. I am 54 with four kids and I do many other things. Even if I stopped everything else, spent months working just on chess, for a long match against most of the top players, a classical match, six hours, say, I don't stand a chance. I have a better chance in shorter matches. Rapid is 25 minutes, or blitz events where you have five minutes to make a move, or bullet games, where it is one minute. For blitz, five-minutes chess, I would be top ten, top five. But longer games, no chance.

Chess strategy as such today is still in its diapers, despite Tarrasch's statement 'We live today in a beautiful time of progress in all fields'. Not even the slightest attempt has been made to explore and formulate the laws of chess strategy.

Chess strength in general and chess strength in a specific match are by no means one and the same thing.

Leonard Chess passed, and that was the end of the Chess label for that time.

Chess is a good way to learn, to keep your brain fit and the ego in check, a mental form of your local gymnasium. Those who see chess merely as a means of self-proof make the game experience uncomfortable and drive many of the better, more sensitive brains to analysis, correspondence, problems, studies and the like.

I had lunch with a chess champion the other day. I knew he was a chess champion because it took him 20 minutes to pass the salt.

When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties - before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since.

Chess holds deep wisdoms of the people. It is truly an image of life, the reflection of human fate that has shown us the earthly way of suffering in darkness and permanent shortage of time. Like in chess, we encounter all kinds of traps, mistakes, settlements, sacrifices, kings, and queens, doubled pawns, and extraordinary moves while we are on the board ourselves.

A championship contender in the early twentieth century needed charisma and a knack for cultivating sponsorship, and Rubinstein was the epitome of the shy and unsocial chess player. Now matter how great his chess skills, he lacked the people skills to be a self-promoter and fund-raiser.

Chess is like body-building. If you train every day, you stay in top shape. It is the same with your brain - chess is a matter of daily training.

My job is to play chess, the game that I love. I achieve what I can in chess. That is what I focus on. Basically, I am always focused on playing the game, and this is important to me.

We've seen computers play chess and beat grand masters. We've seen computers drive a car across a desert. But interestingly, playing chess is easy, but having a conversation about nothing is really difficult for a computer.

Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.

... in itself the title of world champion does not give any significicant advantages, if it is not acknowledged by the entire chess world, and a champion who does not have the chess world behind him is, in my view, a laughing-stock.

Of chess it has often been said that life is not long enough for it - but that is the fault of life, not chess.

If you're playing a one-minute game, I could squeeze in five to six games before anybody walked by my cubicle. So I got really good at blitz, one-minute chess games. But that's kind of like the cheap chess version.

Most chess players know, thanks to the study of master games, that two bishops are stronger than two knights or than bishop and knight, though very few know the reason for this advantage and how to turn it to account.

Every time I win a tournament I have to think that there is something wrong with modern chess.

When you play chess alone it's always your move.

You can become a big master in chess only if you see your mistakes and short-comings. Exactly the same as in life itself.

Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right.

You know, comrade Pachman, I don't enjoy being a Minister, I would rather play chess like you, or make a revolution in Venezuela.

At lunchtime the place is jumping, while at night the dining rooms could have been rented out for chess tournaments.

If you want to build a high performance organization, you've got to play chess, not checkers.

But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.

The game of chess is the most fascinating and intellectual pastime which the wisdom of antiquity has bequeathed to us.

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

[Pawn Sacrifice is] about the 1972 chess championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. I play Paul Marshall.It was a great story of a very peculiar man, another genius who's troubled and lived an interesting life. I had great fun making that.

When I was young, my favorite picture book was 'Fletcher and Zenobia,' written by Edward Gorey and illustrated by Victoria Chess. It's long out of print now, but its mix of macabre humor and 1960s psychedelia made it a perfect children's book for the times.

Not infrequently ... the theoretical is a synonym of the stereotyped. For the 'theoretical' in chess is nothing more than that which can be found in the textbooks and to which players try to conform because they cannot think up anything better or equal, anything original.

Politics in Iran is not played like American football. It's played like chess. There are multiple moves. You're jumping ahead. And a lot of it is very subtle, and it catches you by surprise later on. So I don't want to go overboard on this.

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.

I want to serve chess through games, books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world.

Like us as Black", beg the chess pieces," and you will anyway like us as White

When I was in grade school I was into chess club, Latin club, D&D, computer camp - everything that made vaginas go away.

The game of baseball between pitcher and hitter sets up like a game of chess in that you have to anticipate several moves ahead to set up your opponent.

Computers have changed the world of chess.

It was Steinitz who was the first to establish the basic principles of general chess strategy. He was a pioneer and one of the most profound researchers into the thruth of the game, which was hidden from his contemporaries.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

I have always felt that Judit was a relatively slow starter, though she is extremely motivated, diligent, hard-working, and disciplined towards her goals in chess and in life.

Many Chess players were surprised when after the game, Fischer quietly explained: 'I had already analyzed this possibility' in a position which I thought was not possible to foresee from the opening

Being in the military just lets you know how helpless you are. You could train forever but you're still at the mercy of someone in the Pentagon, or somebody in the rear moving you around like a chess piece.

In boxing you create a strategy to beat each new opponent, it's just like chess.

In my experience, when I went to school, and especially in after-school, and during breaks, a lot of people wanted to sit down and play chess up till a certain age when it was not supposed to be cool anymore and people wanted to do other things.