A Quote by Mikhail Tal

Chess isn't football or hockey.

Mikhail Tal

Quote Topics

Chess Football Hockey

Quote Author

Mikhail Tal
Latvian - Chess Player
November 9, 1936 - June 28, 1992

"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."

Reggie Rivers

Chess is a very positive way to exercise your mind. It makes you look at the whole picture...what are your options and what is the best thing to do? In football, you are mostly reacting from a defensive point of view...but you always want to be counterattacking...a similarity with chess strategy. Chess and offensive football are quite similar; you sacrifice something now to get something back later.

Barney Chavous

I think part of what people are responding to with Lambeau Field is that it's a solid culture. There's so much committed to what hockey means and that's how we feel about football. It's just a great connection between the culture of football and the culture of hockey.

Jon Jones

If there is hockey or football and cricket on my television, I prefer to watch hockey.

Gautam Gambhir

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

Rubin Carter

I had a hockey puck and stick-the only ones in town. I definitely would have played hockey ahead of football, had it been available.

Merlin Olsen

We can't play stupid hockey, dumb hockey, greedy hockey, selfish hockey. We have to put the team ahead of our personal feelings.

Terry Crisp

The English play hockey in any weather. Thunder, lightning, plague of locusts... nothing can stop the hockey. Do not fight the hockey, for the hockey will win.

Maureen Johnson

I grew up playing football. I'm a huge hockey and football fan.

Danielle Campbell

It was either football or hockey. I chose football, and I think it's worked out OK so far.

Davis Webb

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.

Mikhail Botvinnik

For me, baseball is more comparable to chess than it is to hockey.

Jeff Garlin

Chess is a lot of fun for me. Football is a physical game, and in chess you can just beat someone mentally - you outwit somebody, outmaneuver them, think ahead of them.

Larry Fitzgerald

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.

Bobby Fischer

Chess programs don't play chess the way humans play chess. We don't really know how humans play chess, but one of the things we do is spot some opportunity on the chess board toward a move to capture the opponent's queen.