Great chess quotes

[Frank Dixon]

Re: Great chess quotes

During the London Congress of 1922, a chess patron took [J.R.] Capablanca and [Alexander] Alekhine to a music hall show. "Capablanca never took his eyes off the chorus, and Alekhine never looked up from his pocket chess set," said the patron later. :)
[Source: "The Bobby Fischer I Knew And Other Stories", by Arnold Denker and Larry Parr, 1995, p. 151]

[Frank Dixon]

Re: Great chess quotes

"I am an officer of the czar!" :)
Alexander Alekhine (1892-1946), World Champion 1927-1935 and 1937-1946, was the son of a Russian nobleman who was displaced by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, 100 years ago. He apparently enjoyed shouting out this phrase in a thick Russian accent while banging tables!
(Source: "The Bobby Fischer I Knew And Other Stories", by Arnold Denker and Larry Parr, 1995, p. 154.)

[Frank Dixon]

Re: Great chess quotes

"Without men such as he, the chess world would not have been nearly what it is. It is not the rules and the precepts which make the chess community, it is the individuals." :)

Former World Champion Dr. Max Euwe (1901-1981), writing in tribute to GM Dr. Savielly Tartakower (1887-1956), upon learning of Tartakower's death.

[Frank Dixon]

Re: Marottichal, Kerala, India

"Our last resource is resignation." :)
John Adams, future U.S. President, to Thomas Jefferson, future U.S. President, late 1700s. Not in a chess context, but insightful nonetheless. :)

[Nigel Hanrahan]

Marottichal, Kerala, India

"“Luckily for us chess is more addictive than alcohol."

BBC Travel: The ancient game that saved a village

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great chess quotes

Great Chess Quotes

May 18, 2017

Quoted by Daniil Dubov:

Vallejo once said that a chess player's career consists of two parts: the part when he's dreaming to become a world champion, and the part when he understands that he'll never become a world champion.


https://www.chess.com/blog/Spektrows...h-daniil-dubov

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great chess quotes

Great Chess Quotes

May 15, 2017

You are the captain of the club chess team. You get the best out of your players with mild threats such as:

“One more loss and you’re off the team”

“You know, Goodman, you could be replaced on first board by any 1200 player”

But lately these threats are losing their power. You need a fresh new one.

Cheer up and use this one made by Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the head of the Republic of Ingushetia, at the Moscow Grand Prix 2017.

He is patron of Ernesto Inarkiev and yesterday said to him, “If you lose, you cannot come back to Ingushetia!”

https://www.chess.com/news/view/ding...moscow-gp-6036

Your players may be puzzled but they will toe the line, knowing that the elysium of their club will be forever denied them.

[Craig J. McGilly]

Re: Great chess quotes

"Chess is not an amusement, and you must either be an enthusiast or detest it. No medium is possible." J.M. Barrie

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great chess quotes

Great Chess Quotes

May 2, 2017

Freshly-squeezed orange juice and a thick steak

For years whenever I thought of Bobby Fischer in Argentina my association was always with orange juice and steak.

I present here a quote from a Life article by Brad Darrach about Fischer in Buenos Aires, just after beating Tigran Petrosian in their semi-final match to see who would challenge Boris Spassky for the WCC.

Bobby Fischer is a ferocious winner

Brad Darrach
Life Magazine, November 12, 1971

"Congratulations on your victory," I tried to say.

"Yeah, yeah." Fischer mumbled shyly and turned away to grab a coat and tie. "Got to eat. Starved. Talk later." And he hurried off to breakfast with about twenty Russian chess magazines tucked under his arm.

In the lobby people rushed up to Fischer from all directions. He looked startled and irritated. Argentina is chess-crazy (there are 60 chess clubs in Buenos Aires alone) and for more than a month he had been stalked day and night by Latin adoration. A white-haired man collared him now and spoke earnestly. A young girl grabbed his arm and said something intense that made him pull back and then stride away. A U. S. TV sports team puffed along at his elbow, but he wasn't having any. "Later!" he flung at them and, tilting forward, lurched off with a powerful wambling stride that made him look like Captain Ahab making headway in a high wind.

At the London Grill, a transplanted English pub of pleasantly peeling charm, Fischer made for a back table and ordered two 12-ounce glasses of fresh orange juice, the largest steak in the house, a mixed green salad and a pint bottle of carbonated mineral water. Five minutes later he ordered another glass of orange juice, and by the time he was ready for a huge dish of bananas and superrich Chantilly cream he had finished his fourth pint of mineral water. He ate with the oral drive of a barracuda and talked incessantly about how wonderful the food was. "Look at that juice! Fresh, not frozen! And where else can you get a glass that big for less than ten cents? Look at that steak! It's almost two inches thick. And YOU can really taste it! Not like that lousy American meat, all full of chemicals. This is natural meat! I tell you, Argentine food is the finest in the world! They really go in for quality here. Like clothes. You can get a tailor-made suit here for less than $100, and they last! Shoes too. They got the best shoes in the world here. Look at this pair I got on. Here, look at them!" Quickly untying an enormous brown shoe, he took it off and handed it across the table. "Look at that sole! It's composition and I'm telling you it's strong! I go through an ordinary pair of shoes in days. Days! But I've had this pair for a year and it's still great. I mean I love America and I'd never be anything else but an American, but things are failing apart up there. Everybody doing his own thing just won't work. We need organization! We need to get back to basic values!" Shaking his head sadly, he ordered another dish of bananas and Chantilly.

http://bobbyfischer.net/bobby05.html

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great chess quotes

Great Chess Quotes

April 26, 2017

Magnus Carlsen’s Glasses and Hair

Magnus came to the Grenke Classic in April, 2017 looking unrecognizable. He had new glasses on and a mop of hair that looked like it hadn’t been cut for six months. His appearance was compared to that of Jon Ludvig Hammer, Leonard Hofstader, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Frode Urkedal.

The ultimate comment though is from a tweet by Olimpiu Urcan:

Diminished eyesight, sudden and uncontrollable hair growth, increased thirst..Is Carlsen turning into a werewolf?

21 Apr 2017

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great chess quotes

Great Chess Quotes

April 19, 2017

The Right to Exist

The Grenke Chess Classic is taking place at the moment in Germany. Today Jan Gustafsson, Peter Leko and Rustam Kasimdzhanov were the commentators on chess24.com.

During the analysis of a knight move in Carlsen-Caruana:

Peter Leko: White doesn’t have the right to play for an advantage in this position.

Rustam Kasimdzhanov: That statement seems normal to people brought up under the socialist system.

I was working with Vishy Anand and said that ‘this move has a right to exist’. He was surprised. In the Soviet Union this is the normal thing to say.

Jan Gustafsson: What does it mean? That there is some narrative to a chess game and you only have a right to be better if your opponent makes a mistake?

Rustam Kasimdzhanov: In Soviet understanding, some moves are antipositional, ugly and so offensive, that they don’t have a right to exist.

The reality proves otherwise. Imaginative players play something that doesn’t have a right to exist and it turns out that the move does have a right to exist!
________

I have heard of the concept of a country having the right to exist but not a chess move. Does any reader know of an annotation with this phrase in it?

[Kerry Liles]

Re: Great chess quotes

Not sure if this resource has been posted in here already (the searching capabilities of this forum could be better...)

http://www.chessentials.com/best-chess-quotes/

some interesting quotes and links in there!

[Kerry Liles]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

"If you have made a mistake or committed an inaccuracy there is no need to become annoyed and to think that everything is lost.
You have to reorient yourself quickly and find a new plan in the new situation..."

David Bronstein
https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1408763065847308

[Wayne Komer]

Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

April 8, 2017

Alexander Grischuk granted an interview to Sovietsky Sport on April 7. A few quotes from that interview

See:

http://www.sovsport.ru/gazeta/article-item/971146
and
https://chess24.com/en/read/news/ale...is-just-a-game

Ex-World Champion Vladimir Kramnik declared that the current Candidates cycle will be the last for him. Do you believe him?

Kramnik has been making such declarations for four cycles in a row. He already told me 13 years ago that he was about to quit. Vladimir is rated no. 4 in the world and is one of the world’s very top chess professionals. He can still play and play

Some grandmasters express the opinion that Carlsen is a more multifaceted chess player than Kasparov. Do you agree?

Carlsen is a very strong chess player, a World Champion, but Kasparov is no. 1 for me, if you take all the chess players over the last thirty years or so.

Kasparov was considered to have a demonic effect on his opponents – they’d already be lost before the game began.

There’s no doubt he exuded a powerful energy.

Does Carlsen have such charisma?

Yes, because some strong grandmasters play much worse against him than they’re capable of doing. For example, Hikaru Nakamura has a terrible negative score against Carlsen.

Don’t accelerated time controls kill chess?

In what sense? Chess is only a game. If your opponent is better than you and wins he hasn’t killed you, after all.

People think that it’s only at the classical time control that chess approaches a work of art, while in rapid you can’t create an immortal work.

That depends on your approach to chess. If someone thinks chess possesses some sacred meaning then I can only envy that person. Perhaps I’d also like to think like that, but I don’t. For me it’s just a game and I can’t rank it alongside, for instance, an art like music.

[Nigel Hanrahan]

What is best in life, Conan?

[from the New York Times obit recently ...] "Mr. Bisguier was such a competitor that even beating a vaunted opponent did not always satisfy him. In 1961, for example, he defeated Paul Keres, who many thought was good enough to be world champion. But Mr. Bisguier was not proud of the game. He thought there had been nothing special about the way he played.

“After the game I was strangely depressed at having wasted an opportunity,” he wrote in his autobiography, “The Art of Bisguier” (with Newton Berry, 2008). “I wanted to beat him brilliantly. After all, if one has the chance to play Keres only a few times in his life, is it not better to go down in defeat in a fine game against an immortal than to win by doing ‘nothing?’”

“I wanted to beat him brilliantly. After all, if one has the chance to play Keres only a few times in his life, is it not better to go down in defeat in a fine game against an immortal than to win by doing ‘nothing?’”

Arthur's obit