Quotes About Chess

I consider myself to be a genius who happens to play chess.

Chess and me, it's hard to take them apart. It's like my alter ego.

In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolise the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.

In such circumstances there can be no argument; the necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached ... It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy. The point that is really at issue remains untouched.

Fencing is a game of living chess, a match where reflexes only work in combination with intent, and mind and body must work together at every moment.

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.

What was great about Fischer is that when he became world champion is that chess was being covered everywhere. It was in all the major newspapers, it was on TV.

In Gujarat, we had the world record of largest number of chess games in a single venue - 20,500 - and in Tamil Nadu, I have been emphasizing on the positives of chess to the authorities.

I picked it up just for relaxation. I can sit down and get into the game and escape that it's a big game tomorrow, escape that we need a win, or whatever. My wife knows, after a game I get home at 12:30, I'm playing chess till 3 o'clock in the morning.

Television is like speed chess, as you have no time and no money. It is like trying to play Grandmaster chess with a 20 minute timer. The rewards are great, though, as it moves faster and you get to see the finished results much quicker.

When you're actually boxing, unless it's a proper grudge match, it's less about beating the person up and more about being better within yourself. Being patient, timing things, like chess, so really, it's as much down to you as what the other person does - and that's life.

I look at improvising as a prolonged game of chess. There's an opening gambit with your pawn in a complex game I have with one character, and lots of side games with other characters, and another game with myself - and in each game you make all these tiny, tiny moves that get you to the endgame.

If, in our first match for the world champion's title, I had managed to make the score 6-0, there would have been no Kasparov as a good chess player at all.

I feel that my relationship with Kasparov now is much the same as it had been before the match - good. As for his reaction, well it can't be nice to lose your title after so long, but he was very generous.

Fighting Manny Pacquiao is like playing a very fast game of chess. He was very fast and sharp. You have to be alert at all times and on your toes. There was a lot of incoming.

The blunders are all there on the board, waiting to be made.

There was open collusion between the Russian players. They agreed ahead of time to draw the games they played against each other. Every time they drew they gave each other half a point.

God save you from ever being obliged to beat in a game of chess, whose stake is your life, you having but four poor pawns and pieces and your adversary with his full force unshorn. But if you are, provided you have any strength with breadth of will, do not despair. Though mesmeric power may not save you, it may help you; try it at all events.

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.

In other words, evolution is neither a free-for-all, nor the execution of a rigidly predetermined computer programme. It could be compared to a musical composition whose possibilities are limited by the rules of harmony and the structure of the diatonic scales-which, however, permit an inexhaustible number of original creations. Or it could be compared to the game of chess obeying fixed rules but with equally inexhaustible variations.

En la vida pasa como con el ajedrez: en ambos trazamos, ciertamente, un plan, pero este queda total y completamente subordinado por aquello que, en el ajedrez, se le antoja hacer a nuestro adversario y, en la vida, al destino. La mayoría de las veces, las modificaciones resultantes son tan significativas que nuestro plan, cuando llega a realizarse, apenas queda reconocible en algunos rasgos básicos.

Aronian made the interesting point that if I could force a passed a-pawn I might have winning chances

Chess is about the experience of passion, intimacy and caring but not in the way we typically use these terms. The game reveals implicit meanings in the idea of love by offering a shift in perspective and context. The point is that metaphors don't function merely as comparisons but more as translations, recreations or re-presentations.

In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame.' Jose Raul Capablanca