Chess History Quotes

His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century.

When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties - before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since.

The first great chess players, including the world champion, got by perfectly well without constant coaches.

I honestly don't read that much. Obviously I read chess books - in terms of favorites, Kasparov's 'My Great Predecessors' is pretty good.

Like everyone, I was a kid who played chess when I was young. And I am admittedly old enough to have been around during the fervor of the match in Reykjavik and the rise of Bobby Fischer, so those two things conspired to pique my interest.

My mother is Russian and father Nepalese, so we always had a chess board at home. Chess is part of the culture in both Russia and Nepal.

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

The best chess masters of every epoch have been closely linked with the values of the society in which they lived and worked. All the changes of a cultural, political, and psychological background are reflected in the style and ideas of their play.

In general there is something puzzling about the fact that the most renowned figures in chess - Morphy, Pillsbury, Capablanca and Fischer - were born in America.

He is the so-called father of the modern school of chess; before him, the King was considered a weak piece and players set out to attack the King directly. Steinitz claimed that the King was well able to take care of itself, and ought not to be attacked until one had some other positional advantage. He understood more about the use of squares than Morphy and contributed a great deal more to chess theory.

By this measure (on the gap between Fischer & his contemporaries), I consider him the greatest world champion

[Pawn Sacrifice is] about the 1972 chess championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. I play Paul Marshall.It was a great story of a very peculiar man, another genius who's troubled and lived an interesting life. I had great fun making that.

I was going to do a book about the first prearranged Karpov-Kasparov match, '84-'85. But the God-damn Jews have stolen my entire file on that.

Seville never had a rich chess tradition. Valencia is entirely different, it is enough to say that one of the city squares is named after me.