Top 346 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Chess Players - Page 6

Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judging. Chess must not be memorized.

My most difficult opponent is myself. When I am playing I often involuntarily make a world champion out of a candidate master.

It is a delight to watch a young and gifted chess player. To him have come no sinister experiences; to him continual carping care is foreign. Therefore he loves the attack and the bold sacrifice; for theirin lies the shortest way to his ultimate objective.

Inexperienced players have a fear of this piece, which seems to them enigmatic, mysterious, and astonishing in its power. We must admit that it has remarkable characteristics which compel respect and occasionally surprise the most wary players.

If you don't want to be stabbed in the back you should be aware of who is standing behind you.

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.

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.

The best reason to abolish it, in my opinion, is that everyone should deal with his time in the best way; there is no good reason why you should get half a minute extra with each move, except that it's a bit easier for the arbiter.

One doesn't have to play well, it's enough to play better than your opponent

To lose one's objective attitude to a position, nearly always means ruining your game.

The hardest game to win is a won game

Help your pieces so they can help you

I am pleased that in a match for the World Championship I was able to conduct a game in the style of Akiba Rubinstein, where the entire strategic course was maintained from the first to the last move.

A strong player requires only a few minutes of thought to get to the heart of the conflict. You see a solution immediately, and half an hour later merely convince yourself that your intuition has not deceived you.

In the opening a master should play like a book, in the mid-game he should play like a magician, in the ending he should play like a machine.

By positional play a master tries to prove and exploit true values, whereas by combinations he seeks to refute false values ... A combination produces an unexpected re-assessment of values.

It was clear to me that the vulnerable point of the American Grandmaster (Bobby Fischer) was in double-edged, hanging, irrational positions, where he often failed to find a win even in a won position

It is ... impossible to keep one's excellence in a little glass casket, like a jewel, to take it out whenever wanted. On the contrary, it can only be conserved by continuous and good practice.

Have you ever seen a chess article without a brilliant example of the author's own play? 'Silly question,' you will say. Quite.

Sex is the main way we exist on the planet. It's an essential part of life.

People who want to improve should take their defeats as lessons, and endeavor to learn what to avoid in the future. You must also have the courage of your convictions. If you think your move is good, make it.

Fischer, who may or may not be mad as a hatter, has every right to be horrified

Every move creates a weakness.

Sometimes it happens that the computer's assessment is very abstract. It's correct, but it's not useful for a practical game. You have to prove the assessment with very strong moves and if you don't find all of these strong moves you may lose very quickly. For a computer this is not a problem, but for humans it is not so easy.

The greatest compliment one can pay a master is to compare him with Capablanca.

Rating systems work perfectly for players who play only in round robin closed events. I think most of them are overrated. Organizers invite same people over and over because they have the same rating and their rating stays high.

Wilhelm Steinitz was the first man to appreciate the inherent logic behind the game of chess.

Tartakower once wrote that after planting a Knight in the center you can go to sleep. This is not to be taken literally, of course, but it contains more than a germ of truth.

In the middlegame, the king is merely an extra, but in the endgame, he is one of the star actors.

I feel that everyone is good. In this way I give every game my best effort. The moment that you let up is the time that you can be hit by the sucker punch.

Haste is never more dangerous than when you feel that victory is in your grasp.

When you trade, the key concern is not always the value of the pieces being exchanged, but what's left on the board.

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.

Method rules his training, which blends the physical with the mental. How many chess masters put in, prior to an important match, an allotted time daily to bicycling and shadow-boxing, followed by a cold douche and a brisk rub down?

I consider Mr. Morphy the finest chess player who ever existed. He is far superior to any now living, and would doubtless have beaten Labourdonnais himself. In all his games with me, he has not only played, in every instance, the exact move, but the most exact. He never makes a mistake; but, if his adversary commits the slightest error, he is lost.

In a gambit you give up a Pawn for the sake of getting a lost game

It's funny, but many people don't understand why I draw so many games nowadays. They think my style must have changed but this is not the case at all. The answer to this drawing disease is that my favorite squares are e6, f7, g7 and h7 and everyone now knows this. They protect these squares not once but four times!

Finally the novelty came. These days it seems to be normal to play novelties somewhere in the ending. Apart from just being the novelty, this move is also very strong. It is most probably that Radjabov found this natural improvement over the board, as he spend more than an hour, if I am not mistaken. But it could be that he was just trying to remember his own analysis (can you imagine how much he has to remember??).

By playing slowly during the early phases of a game I am able to grasp the basic requirements of each position. Then, despite being in time pressure, I have no difficulty in finding the best continuation. Incidentally, it is an odd fact that more often than not it is my opponent who gets the jitters when I am compelled to make these hurried moves.

I'm basically stubborn. If anyone disapproved of my being influenced by comics, I simply ignored them.

A good player is always lucky.

A thorough knowledge of the elements takes us more than half the road to mastership

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

Chess is most certainly not my life.

The threat is stronger than the execution.

In mathematics, if I find a new approach to a problem, another mathematician might claim that he has a better, more elegant solution. In chess, if anybody claims he is better than I, I can checkmate him.