Quotes About Chess

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

I'm a lone wolf, unmarried…and not rich….I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers and sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens…nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn't solve it, like a lot of my problems.

I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a

I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen, and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortcha-koff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armour, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

For touching an adversary's man, when it cannot be captured, the offender must move his King.

For playing a man to a square to which it cannot be legally moved, the adversary, at his option, may require him to move the man legally, or to move the King.

Chess is so interesting in itself, as not to need the view of gain to induce engaging in it; and thence it is never played for money

A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians.

Chess was Capablanca's mother tongue.

The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.

Caissa, the goddess of chess, had punished me for my conservative play, for betraying my nature.

Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.

Lack of patience is probably the most common reason for losing a game, or drawing games that should have been won.

Patience is the most valuable trait of the endgame player.

I like to grasp the initiative and not give my opponent peace of mind.

Chess has this in common with making poetry; that the desire for it comes upon the amateur in gusts.

In chess the rules are fixed and the outcome is unpredictable, whereas in Putin's Russia the rules are unpredictable and the outcome is fixed.

You know, comrade Pachman, I don't enjoy being a Minister, I would rather play chess like you, or make a revolution in Venezuela.

The only positive contribution to chess from Fischer in the last 20 years.

The power of hanging Pawns is based precisely in their Mobility, in their Ability to create acute situations instantly.

When you have a World Champion in your smartphone, the myth of the superior brainpower of human chess champions has lost its power.

Turing's report left these questions hanging, but he did suggest a forerunner of what would eventually become the Turing Test: if you played chess against a learning machine, would you know if it was a human being or a computer?

There's evidence, too, that being good at maths is tied to a more general capacity to spot hidden structures in data. This could explain why it's common to find people who excel at both maths and music, and why training at chess can help improve maths scores – both music and chess have complex data structures at their heart.