Chess Mastery Quotes

You can only get good at Chess if you love the game

Chess is not for timid souls.

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

Chess will always be the master of us all.

These guys are playing checkers. I'm out here playing chess. When they figure it out, it's too late.

By the time a player becomes a Grandmaster, almost all of his training time is dedicated to work on this first phase. The opening is the only phase that holds out the potential for true creativity and doing something entirely new.

The chess player who develops the ability to play two dozen boards at a time will benefit from learning to compress his or her analysis into less time.

Combination is a soul of chess.

I don't know if people know this but I am pretty good at chess. I was always on the chess team at school when I was younger.

It's important, according to me, to train in small doses so as to not lose the joy of playing chess. I personally think too many coaching and training classes may take away a child's interest in the game itself. The essential thing to do is practise often and, in case of a doubt, to consult a trainer.

A lifetime in not enough to learn everything about chess.

Capablanca possessed an amazing ability to quickly see into a position and intuitively grasp its main features. His style, one of the purest, most crystal-clear in the entire history of chess, astonishes one with his logic.

There's no luck involved in chess. You just have to work at it.

For me right now I think being the world number one is a bigger deal than being the world champion because I think it shows better who plays the best chess. That sounds self-serving but I think it's also right.

My challenge when I came back was to face the young talent, dissect their games, and show them maybe that they needed to learn more about the game than just the money aspect.

A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician.

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed.

Chess is one long regret.

To play chess on a truly high level requires a constant stream of exact, informed decisions, made in real time and under pressure from your opponent. What's more, it requires a synthesis of some very different virtues, all of which are necessary to good decisions: calculatioñ, creativity and a desire for results. If you ask a Grandmaster, an artist and a computer scientist what makes a good chess player, you'll get a glimpse of these different strengths in action.

There is only one thing Fischer does in Chess without pleasure: to lose!

Like Dvoretsky, I think that (all other things being equal), the analytical method of studying chess must give you a colossal advantage over the chess pragmatist, and that there can be no certainty in chess without analysis. I personally acquired these views from my sessions with Mikhail Botvinnik, and they laid the foundations of my chess-playing life.

I started by just sitting by the chessboard exploring things. I didn't even have books at first, and I just played by myself. I learnt a lot from that, and I feel that it is a big reason why I now have a good intuitive understanding of chess.

A master looks at every move he would like to make, especially the impossible ones