Quotes About Chess

Chess programs don't play chess the way humans play chess. We don't really know how humans play chess, but one of the things we do is spot some opportunity on the chess board toward a move to capture the opponent's queen.

Like Dvoretsky, I think that (all other things being equal), the analytical method of studying chess must give you a colossal advantage over the chess pragmatist, and that there can be no certainty in chess without analysis. I personally acquired these views from my sessions with Mikhail Botvinnik, and they laid the foundations of my chess-playing life.

Chess teaches foresight, by having to plan ahead; vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board; caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves; and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life - that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.

Well, I kind of split my life into two pieces. One was where my chess career lies. There, I kept my sanity, so to speak, and my logic. And the other was my religious life. I tried to apply what I learned in the church to my chess career too. But I still was studying chess. I wasn't just "trusting in God" to give me the moves.

It's the horsey-shape piece that moves in an L shape. It's what makes chess complicated, and why stupid people can't play chess. Go play checkers! Knights are the first piece you look at. They elevate the game. No chess master wants to lose her knights.

There is no remorse like a remorse of chess. It is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in chess.

I don't think I have a favorite chess move, other than checkmate, because each move is part of a combination of other moves. Just like I don't have a favorite piece, because they all work together. I mean, I love myself; I am the king on the board, but other pieces do different things and they all work together, so it's not one particular move unless it's checkmate because usually there's an answer. You know, chess is about questions and answers.

Chess continues to advance over time, so the players of the future will inevitably surpass me in the quality of their play, assuming the rules and regulations allow them to play serious chess. But it will likely be a long time before anyone spends 20 consecutive years as number, one as I did.

I haven't played a chess match for several decades. At one point I lost most of my chess games. Then I realized many of my competitors were memorizing the best moves and I was unwilling to do this.

The first chess book that I read was Dufresne's self-tutor, published with Lasker's Common Sense in Chess as an appendix.

I get off on the interaction with people, and I love the chess of a movie and particularly - not only in preproduction or in production or postproduction - the behavioral chess. That is, learning and being humbled by and also teaching certain people certain things. I love that. As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together.

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.

I think most people are fascinated by chess for that reason. It's just these mystical shapes. It's almost like Harry Potteresque, like wizard's chess in a way. The pieces come alive and you're the sorcerer. You're the magician and you get to do what you want with them and hopefully you don't screw it up.

It's not that the Democrats are playing checkers and the Republicans are playing chess. It's that the Republicans are playing chess and the Democrats are in the nurse's office because once again they glued their balls to their thighs.

A game of chess holds many secrets. Fortunately! That is why we cannot clearly state whether chess is science, art, or a sport.

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

It's the fault of the chess players themselves. I don't know what they used to be, but now they're not the most gentlemanly group. When it was a game played by the aristocrats it had more like you know dignity to it. When they used to have the clubs, like no women were allowed and everybody went in dressed in a suit, a tie, like gentlemen, you know. Now, kids come running in their sneakers. Even in the best chess club-and they got women in there. It's a social place and people are making noise, it's a madhouse.

I'm not sure I would call it agony but there is a kind of cyclic frustration. You get one story right and then here comes another one. When does that end? What I'm trying to do is get it to end right now, by recognizing that that cycle is writing. That is: trying to understand the frustrations and setbacks (and agony) as part of a bigger chess game you are playing with art itself.

Can you buy an entire chess set in a pawn shop?

I guess a certain amount of temperament is expected of Chess geniuses

Chess is beautiful enough to waste your life for.

Marriage is like a chess match is initiated and the board expands over time until it takes up all of a life.

All conceptions in the game of chess have a geometrical basis.

Chess is, above all, a fight.

I am more strongly confirmed than ever in the belief that the time devoted to chess is literally frittered away.

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

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

The only positive contribution to chess from Fischer in the last 20 years.

Boxing and chess are similar. It’s about the choice of means. Sometimes I need a pawn, a bishop or a knight to defeat my opponent. It’s about finding the best way. A good boxer has to be variable. He doesn’t just need to know how to punch. He must also know how to protect himself, how to defend, how to avoid the opponent’s punches. Only a complete fighter can become champion.

Chess can never reach its height by following in the path of science ... Let us, therefore, make a new effort and with the help of our imagination turn the struggle of technique into a battle of ideas.

The pawn is the soul of chess.

I attend to my fitness. I go the gym every day and try to maintain my physical fitness; without that, it is tough to take challenges on the chess board.

The truth is that throughout my careers in both chess and the martial arts, I often knew that my rivals were more naturally gifted than me - either with their mental machines or their bodies. But I have believed in my training, my approach to learning, and my ability to rise to the challenge under pressure.

If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician.

Carlsen came with a line that was not very theoretical, trying to challenge the World Champion to play chess. [...] But Anand proved that even this obscure line is something he has studied before, and it was Carlsen that was set back.

No Chess Grandmaster is normal; they only differ in the extent of their madness

When I speak of the beauty of a game of chess, then naturally this is subjective. Beauty can be found in a very technical, mathematical game for example. That is the beauty of clarity.

I study chess eight hours a day, on principle.

I looked upon a clock to find the truth. The hours were passing like ivory chess figures, striking piano notes, and the minutes raced on wires mounted like tin soldiers. Hours like tall ebony women with gongs between their legs, tolling continuously so that I could not count them. I heard the rolling of my heart-beats; I heard the footsteps of my dreams, and the beat of time was lost among them like the face of truth.

Mathematics is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst.

Emotional instability can be one of the factors giving rise to a failure by chess players in important duels. Under the influence of surging emotions (and not necessarily negative ones) we sometimes lose concentration and stop objectively evaluating the events that are taking place on the board.

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.

Chess demands total concentration

I really enjoy playing with someone else and whether it's chess or tennis or games, I love card games. I love that, but I think there's something so important to gain from winning and losing and learning how to lose and how you can be better from that.

You are never too old to play chess!

I don't consider myself a particularly young chess player. I have been playing in the best tournaments in the world since I was 16 years old. In other sports, if you have been playing for seven years, you are not a young prodigy any more. You're one of the pros.

One can say that in the last decades chess has become more of a sport than of a science. I see it from an artistic point of view.

I give 98 percent of my mental energy to Chess Others give only 2 percent