Quotes About Chess

When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport.

"Chess has definitely helped me understand a lot of the strategy of football. In chess, good offense is often an exercise in putting multiple points of pressure on one square. In football, offensive play design (particularly passes) involves putting multiple points of pressure on one player." "In chess, you often give your opponent a move that looks strong for him, but it turns into a trap. Football is the same way. I've always thought of defense in football as being totally reactive. But now I understand the ways in which football defenses force the offense to make certain choices."

The concept of 'talent' is formed under completely abstract criteria, having nothing in common with reality. But the reality is such that I don't understand chess as a whole. But then again no one understands chess in its entirety. Perhaps talent is something else, in chess it is conditionality.

Remember that the machine is there to help you, because at the end of the day, you're not playing freestyle chess, advanced chess, human-plus-machine. If you are playing against other humans, it's about winning the game. The machine will not be assisting you, unless you are cheating of course. And since the machine is not there, you have to make sure that everything you learn from the computer will not badly affect the way you play the real game.

Once in a Moscow chess club I saw how two first-category players knocked pieces off the board as they were exchanged, so that the pieces fell onto the floor. It was as if they were playing skittles and not chess!

Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they've beaten our top human chess champions.

For me, Chess is life and every game is like a new life. Every chess player gets to live many lives in one lifetime.

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.

Between now and when we graduate next year there are at least ten weeks' holiday and five random public holidays. There's email and if you manage to get down to the town, there's text messaging and mobile phone calls. If not, the five minutes you get to speak to me on your communal phone is better than nothing. There are the chess nerds who want to invite you to our school for the chess comp next March and there's this town in the middle, planned by Walter Burley Griffin, where we can meet up and protest against our government's refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty." -Jonah Griggs

I don't know whether computers are improving the style of play, I know they are changing it. Chess has become a different game, one could say that computers have changed the world of chess. That is pretty clear.

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.

I would never suggest to anyone that they drop school for chess. First of all even if you can make it in chess, your social skills need to be developed there.

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

I do not play chess – I fight at chess. Therefore, I willingly combine the tactical with the strategic, the fantastic with the scientific, the combinative with the positional, and I aim to respond to the demands of each given position.

You bring to chess facets of your personality and what you are. I have interests other than chess, like music and world and current affairs. I also have many friends around the world with whom I like to keep in touch.

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

The strategies of offense and defense are very similar between chess and football. Chess really brought closeness to the team back in those days.

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.

... the woman who grows up with the idea that she is simply to be an amiable animal, to be caressed and coaxed, is invariably a bitterly disappointed woman. A game of chess will cure such a conceit forever. The woman that knows the most, thinks the most, feels the most, is the most. Intellectual affection is the only lasting love. Love that has a game of chess in it can checkmate any man and solve the problem of life.

Earlier in my career, I never thought of boxing as a chess game, but I confirm that they are, in fact, very similar. You can plan your fights and strategy just like you would in chess.

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

Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders.

While it is a cause for regret that Fischer did not continue to produce scintillating games, he perhaps had a greater impact on chess than any other twentieth century player

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.

The pawn is the soul of chess.

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

I didn't picture myself as even a grandmaster, to say nothing of aspiring to the chess crown. This was not because I was timid - I wasn't - but because I simply lived in one world, and the grandmasters existed in a completely different one. People like that were not really even people, but like gods or mythical heroes.

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.

Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi have absolutely destroyed chess by their immoral, unethical, prearranged games. These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they're going to know the truth when I do this book!

Far be it from me to force anyone into either chess or dressage, but if you choose to do so yourself, in my opinion there is only one way: follow the rules.

Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.

You cannot say, 'Go! Go! Rah! Rah! Good move!' People want some emotion. Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.

Intuition in chess can be defined as the first move that comes to mind when you see a position.

Chess is a fathead and feudal game.

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.

The proponents of Steinitz' theory - Tarrasch and his supporters - tried to express Steinitz' teaching in the form of laconic rules, and as often happens in such cases, they went too far. The laconic tended to become dogmatic, and chess began to lose its freshness, originality and charm.

Every film, obviously, everyone starts out aiming at making it good, and in the end, filmmaking is really fragile. Making a film is like building a house of cards on the deck of a speeding boat, or playing chess on train tracks. Every opportunity feels like that; it's the one artistic field that's unlike most of the others.

Chess is thirty to forty percent psychology. You don't have this when you play a computer. I can't confuse it

The Russians have fixed world chess.

When I was growing up, I was as socially outcast as any nerd could possibly be. I was in the chess club, I brought D&D stuff to school, I had every game system you could imagine, I spent countless hours at arcades, computer camp, loud presence in the Latin Club. All that stuff.

Mistrust is the most necessary characteristic of the Chess player

Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making.

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 Jewish myself, I somehow didn't see the problem: who cares what a mentally ill (but strangely likable) individual says? If he didn't make some money at chess, I could see him becoming a street person, shaking his fists at cars as they passed by his corner of the block. Isn't it preferable to have him in a self-sufficient position rather than as a liability of the state?

I have frequently stated that I regard chess as an art form, where creativity prevails over other factors.

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

Why are most chess masters under 30?

In so-called communist Romania, chess was held in high esteem, even if our champions were weaker than the Soviets. This game, this "sport of the mind," was at the time a better way to establish your reputation than literature.