Quotes About Chess

But the thing that was great about Capablanca was that he really spoke his mind, he said what he believed was true, he said what he felt. He [Capablanca] wanted to change the rules [of chess] already, back in the twenties, because he said chess was getting played out. He was right. Now chess is completely dead. It is all just memorisation and prearrangement. It's a terrible game now. Very uncreative.

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.

It's easy for me to get along with chess players. Even though we are all very different, we have chess in common.

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

The middlegame I repeat is chess itself, chess with all its possibilities, its attacks, defences, sacrifices, etc.

The correct way to play chess is to develop each and every piece (chess is a team game!), get your King safely castled, and only then begin more aggressive maneuvers.

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

The chess world is obligated to organize a match between the champion of the world and the winner of this Carlsbad tournament - indeed, this is a moral obligation. If the world of chess should remain deaf to its obligation, on the other hand, it would amount to an absolutely unforgivable omission, carrying with it a heavy burden of guilt.

The broader the chess player you are, the easier it is to be competitive, and the same seems to be true of mathematics - if you can find links between different branches of mathematics, it can help you resolve problems. In both mathematics and chess, you study existing theory and use that to go forward.

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 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 is a form of intellectual productiveness, therein lies its peculiar charm. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.

We perceive after a careful consideration of the evolution of the chess mind that such evolution has gone on, in general, in a way quite similar to that in which it goes on with the individual chess player, only with the latter more rapidly.

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. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make man happy.

Chess is a game that benefits people of all ages, especially kids, in any area of life, business, problem solving, and social skills. Chess has the unique ability to combine focus, concentration, imagination, coordination, teamwork, and leadership all at the same time.

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.

Chess as a sport requires a lot of mental stamina, and this is what that makes it different from a physical sport. Chess players have a unique ability of taking in a lot of information and remembering relevant bits. So, memory and mental stamina are the key attributes.

A knowledge of tactics is the foundation of positional play. This is a rule which has stood its test in chess history and one which we cannot impress forcibly enough upon the young chess player. A beginner should avoid Queen's Gambit and French Defence and play open games instead! While he may not win as many games at first, he will in the long run be amply compensated by acquiring a thorough knowledge of the game

When you sit down to play a game you should think only about the position, but not about the opponent. Whether chess is regarded as a science, or an art, or a sport, all the same psychology bears no relation to it and only stands in the way of real 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.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it... He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that...in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.

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

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

One of the things that first attracted me to chess is that it brings you into contact with intelligent, civilized people - men of the stature of Garry Kasparov, the former world champion, who was my part-time coach.

If the kids get a good grasp of what the main lessons are for chess after two or three years of staying with the game, then you've given them brain food and you've given them a skill that can last them a lifetime.

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.

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

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

Yeah, I used to dress badly until I was about sixteen. But people just didn't seem to have enough respect for me, you know And I didn't like that, so I decided I'd have to show them they weren't any better than me, you know? They were sort of priding themselves. They would say, 'He beat us at chess, but he's still just an uncouth kid.' So I decided to dress up.

Being the undisputed world champion is a relief. We instituted a unified chess title, I am the absolute world champion.

You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

Just as it is wrong to work on chess by studying only the first 10-15 moves, so it is wrong to play one and the same opening system, even though it be rich in variations and nuances.

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.

But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.

As a kid, chess was the first thing I studied in a structured way that helped me gain the discipline to study medicine and become successful doctor.

You know I'm finished with the old chess because it's all just a lot of book and memorization you know.

There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.

All I want to do, ever, is play chess.

I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

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

No other great master has been so misunderstood by the vast majority of chess amateurs and even by many masters, as has Emanuel Lasker.

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

Whenever Black succeeds in assuming the initiative in maintaining it to a successful conclusion, the sporting spirit of the chess lover feels gratified, because it shows that the resources of the game are far from being exhausted.

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've always liked puzzles, since I was a kid. I like party games, silly games. I loved chess. I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, but I'm not particularly visual.

Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess." - Ch. 5

I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.

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.