Quotes About Chess

I love chess, and I didn't invent Fischerandom chess to destroy chess. I invented Fischerandom chess to keep chess going. Because I consider the old chess is dying, it really is dead. A lot of people have come up with other rules of chess-type games, with 10x8 boards, new pieces, and all kinds of things. I'm really not interested in that. I want to keep the old chess flavor. I want to keep the old chess game. But just making a change so the starting positions are mixed, so it's not degenerated down to memorisation and prearrangement like it is today.

I used to play a lot of chess and competitive chess and study chess and as you get to the grandmasters and learn their styles when you start copying their games like the way they express themselves through... The way Kasparov or Bobby Fischer expresses themselves through a game of chess is it's astonishing. You can show a chess master one of their games and they'll say "Yeah, that is done by that player."

I ... have two vocations: chess and engineering. If I played chess only, I believe that my success would not have been significantly greater. I can play chess well only when I have fully convalesced from chess and when the 'hunger for chess' once more awakens within me.

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.

Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles

After that, Kasparov stepped back from chess which is, and I want this to be clear, not good for chess in general at all. As a whole, the current situation in the chess world leaves a lot to be desired.

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.

Chess is similar to boxing. You need to develop a strategy, and you need to think two or three steps ahead about what your opponent is doing. You have to be smart. But what’s the difference between chess and boxing? In chess, nobody is an expert, but everybody plays. In boxing everybody is an expert, but nobody fights.

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.

I just think we should look at this as a chess match," he said, "between the world's greatest chess player and Garry Kasparov.

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

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 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 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.

Much time and money has gone into computer chess programs, and so far, no one's figured out how to crack the game, which I think speaks to chess's complexity.

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.

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.

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.

I have a quite feeling of pity for all those who don't know chess; almost like I am sorry for those who never learned to love. Chess, like love and music, has the ability of making people happy.

I really chess-play culture shifts. I'm really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That's what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.

For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again.

Once I asked Teichman what he thought of Bird's chess: "Same as his health," he replied, "always alternating between being dangerously ill and dangerously well."

The battle for the ultimate truth will never be won. And that's why chess is so fascinating.

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

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

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!

The game of chess is a metaphor for life... it teaches you strategy and it teaches you the value of knowing where you are, where you want to get to and what obstacles are in the way that you need to navigate in order to get there.

The pawn is the soul of chess.

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

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

Chess is not dominoes

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.

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.

I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect for others, and eventually, thought neither of us knew it at the time, chess games... "Come from the South, blow from the wind - poom! - North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen."

Making a movie is like a chess game. It's about constantly changing patterns, adapting to new things. It's not just black and white, as you know.

There is no physical punishment in chess; suffering goes on inside the mind. You defend a bad position for hours, you suffer. You lose, you suffer like in any other sport. Suffering euphoria comes when the opponent blunders in a winning position, but it is undeserved.

All opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.

The placing of the centre pawns determines the "topography" of a game of chess.

Which do I prefer? Sex or chess? It depends on the position.

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

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.

The Russians have fixed world chess.

Capablanca possessed an amazing ability to quickly see into a position and intuitively grasp its main features. His style, one of the purest, most crystal-clear in the entire history of chess, astonishes one with his logic.

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.

I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity the man who has remained ignorant of love.

My studies with Botvinnik brought me immense benefit, particularly the homework assignments which forced me to refer to chess books and to work independently.

The good thing in chess is that very often the best moves are the most beautiful ones. The beauty of logic.

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.