Quotes About Chess

Fischer was a good kid but very unsophisticated about anything but chess. It was all chess for him, every waking moment. We'd go down to the Four Continents bookstore and he'd buy any Russian chess material he could get his hands on. He'd learned enough Russian to get the gist of prose and he just absorbed the chess part.

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.

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.

Combinations have always been the most intriguing aspect of Chess. The masters look for them, the public applauds them, the critics praise them. It is because combinations are possible that Chess is more than a lifeless mathematical exercise. They are the poetry of the game; they are to Chess what melody is to music. They represent the triumph of mind over matter

"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."

Capablanca was snatched too early from the chess world. With his death we have lost a great chess genius, the like of whom we will never see again.

Relationships are a battle. They are a chess game. And what did I do? I just threw all my chess pieces down on the board at once, and said, "Here! Have them all!

The only thing Chess players have in common is Chess.

Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

Ultimately chess is just chess - not the best thing in the world and not the worst thing in the world, but there is nothing quite like it.

For me, chess is not a profession, it is a way of life, a passion. People may feel that I have conquered the peak and will not have to struggle. Financially, perhaps that is true; but as far as chess goes, I'm still learning a lot!

I am not a chess historian - I myself am a piece of chess history, which no one can avoid. I will not write about myself, but I am sure that someone will write.

Maybe if I didn't have the talent in chess I'd find the talent in something else. The only thing I know is that I have talent in chess, and I'm satisfied with that.

When I analyse a position, I have a sparring partner who understands chess amazingly well. In a way I feel sorry for him, because of his work with me he cannot play as much chess as he wants. He more or less gave up his playing career.

The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.

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.

His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century.

A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way "trivial" mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising the moves, there is something essential lacking. Chess problems are unimportant. The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful-"important" if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and "serious" expresses what I mean much better.

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

Next to the intellectual stimulation of chess, the educational value is of great importance. Chess teaches logic, imagination, self-discipline, and determination.

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 may play some exhibition games so I don't want to quit the game of chess completely. I just decided and it's a firm decision not to play competitive chess anymore.

... 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.

I learned that fighting on the chess board could also have an impact on the political climate in the country.

The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.

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.

Throughout my chess career I sought out new challenges, looking for things no one had done before.

Whoever sees no other aim in the game than that of giving checkmate to one's opponent will never become a good Chess player

Chess, like love, is infectious at any age.

A game of chess is not an examination of knowledge; it is a battle of nerves.

Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today. However, our looked-down-upon cousin, checkers, or draughts, suffered this fate quite recently thanks to the work of Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta and his unbeatable program Chinook.

I have visited Tromsø and can personally say Tromsø is a beautiful city, well equipped to be an excellent choice for the Chess Olympiad 2014.

It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

Of course, errors are not good for a chess game, but errors are unavoidable and in any case, a game without ant errors, or as they say 'flawless game' is colorless.

Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are acculated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life!

All I expect are wins and to get pleasure from the game. And if someone thinks something about me, if someone's dissatisfied with something... that's not my headache. I hope someday I'll become World Champion - and I'll make all these people happy. But even if for some reason that doesn't happen it won't stop me getting pleasure from chess. I'm sure of that.

Never having played Chess before, it was most interesting to be playing the game with no pieces in front of me. But I still knew how to stroke my hair when I won.

The pawn is the soul of chess.

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

Know that life, which does everything perfectly, is now moving you in a new direction. The chess piece of your existence is being moved to a new square on the board of life.

Chess is a contributor to net human unhappiness, since the pleasure of victory is greatly exceeded by the pain of defeat.

Fencing isn't really fighting. It's more like chess with the risk of puncture wounds

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.

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 will always be in the doldrums as a spectator sport while a draw is given equal mathematical value as a decisive result.

A chess player never has a heart attack in a good position.