Quotes About Chess

Early in my career I had learned the wisdom of not gripping over the hand I was dealt. I had a mentor who taught me lessons about business and life that served me for years. He looked at business the way a grand master might look at a chessboard. There's nothing you can do about where the pieces are. It's only your next move that matters.

Fate knows all about you, it knows your fears and your weaknesses and your confidences and strengths, and it can be ready for all of them when it decides that the time is right. It can move you like a pawn in a terrible game of chess, sacrifice you for the good of others, drop you from a building you should never have been inside, give you a disease that no one has ever heard of. Luck and chance are impartial. Fate is active. It picks on people. Almost as if it thinks about things too much ...

An apocryphal story — the word "apocryphal" here means "obviously untrue" — tells of two people, long ago, who were very bored, and that instead of complaining about it they sat up all night and invented the game of chess so that everyone else in the world, on evenings when there is nothing to do, can also be bored by the perplexing and tedious game they invented.

An apocryphal story - the word "apocryphal" here means "obviously untrue" - tells of two people, long ago, who were very bored, and that instead of complaining about it they sat up all night and invented the game of chess so that everyone else in the world, on evenings when there is nothing to do, can also be bored by the perplexing and tedious game they invented.

A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.

And suddenly I felt panic. I'd made a mistake, like when I'd played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I'd made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn't afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn't want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn't need to see it, the hideous eyelets albino creature that lived underneath.

You can't follow or understand the game unless you play chess yourself, unlike poker which you can pick up in five minutes.

We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema - some actors don't like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre.

When I was preparing for one term's work in the Botvinnik school I had to spend a lot of time on king and pawn endings. So when I came to a tricky position in my own games I knew the winning method.

Even the best grandmasters in the world have had to work hard to acquire the technique of rook endings.

The game gives us a satisfaction that Life denies us. And for the Chess player, the success which crowns his work, the great dispeller of sorrows, is named 'combination'.

Along with my retirement from chess analytical work seems to have gone too.

Don't worry kids, you'll find work. After all, my machine will need strong chess player-programmers. You will be the first.

I am acutely conscious, from vast experience in opens, that guys around, say 2100 or more can definitely play chess and that one often has to work very hard to beat them.

If your opponent offers you a draw, try to work out why he thinks he's worse off

Chess is difficult, it demands work, serious reflection and zealous research.

The image that everyone has of a chess player is not necessarily positive. I think it's partly due to Bobby Fischer - his rise to fame and then his descent into madness. That left a lot of people with negative stereotypes, of nerds who aren't interesting.

At home I mostly stick to online Scrabble, or chess or Risk - games I find far less addictive than the spectacular games created for consoles these days. But, whenever I get the chance, I head over to my friend Kyri's house to play his PS3.

I play a lot of chess, just to a bog-average level. But I find it stimulates your mind with all the combinations of different moves.

If you have a strong opponent, a competition is stimulating. I am generally most open to ideas when I have had a bad result. In chess, too, players specialise. This specialty then becomes an entry barrier.

The Pawn moves only one square at a time, and that straight forward, except in the act of capturing, when it takes one step diagonally to the right or left file on to the square occupied by the man taken, and continues on that file until it captures another man.

'Starcraft' is a fairly strategic game with depth.

Bruce Pandolfini, Josh's original chess teacher, started their first class by taking him in reverse. The board was empty, except for three pieces in an endgame scenario: king and pawn against king.

In chess, everyone's accepted. That's what's great about it. You can be a little bit different. You can be an oddball.