Great chess quotes

[Wayne Komer]

Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

September 18, 2016

Nationality in Chess and a Rebuttal

glamdring27
It would be a lot simpler if players were only allowed to play for one federation for their life and then just live with it. It's a nationality, not a tea party. Most people manage to live with just being whatever nationality they are. Then there wouldn't need to be a debate on who moved where and why. In football (the proper version played mostly with the feet) you have to choose your nation and once you have played for them at senior level they are the only nation you can play for.

Btickler
So if I grew up in North Korea, but somehow managed to escape the country even though the rest of my family was killed trying to get out, then for the rest of my life, I should have to play for the glory and prestige of North Korea, and not my home country where I live and my family lives?

F' that. I'll choose my own nationality, thank you. Hopefully, nations will disappear in next few hundred years anyway. There's no reason for them to exist.

https://www.chess.com/news/usa-wins-...n-section-6522

Reposted September 22, 2016

[Wayne Komer]

Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

August 19, 2016

Surely there are 1001 things to be taken care if you are running the Chess Olympiad for the host country.
I would not have guessed that one of these duties is to scale the highest mountain in your country and plant your flag!

But here:

Olympiad flag raised on Mount Elbrus

Technical director of the Baku Crystal Hall Elchin Mammadov and director of R-Com Tural Mammadov have climbed Mount Elbrus, one of the highest mountain peaks of Europe and Russia (5,642 meters). While on Mount Elbrus, they raised the state flag of Azerbaijan and the banners of the Crystal Hall and the 42 nd World Chess Olympiad due to be held in Baku this September.

And there is a photo at:

http://www1.bakuchessolympiad.com/news/19/120

Would there be snow on Elbrus in August?

According to this precedent, if the Olympiad was staged by Canada, then the organizers would have to plant its flag on Mount Logan in the Yukon, 5956m (19,541 feet) high.

Reposted September 22, 2016

[Wayne Komer]

Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

September 22, 2016

Truth in eBay Advertising

A domestic quarrel furnishes a bargain for the right buyer:

Chess Books: Angry Girlfriend Chess Lot!! #1

My ex girlfriend in a fit of rage, tossed a cup of coffee at me and spilled small drops on a stack of chess books. These books have only been grazed, yet I'm selling at a bargain price, and including an awesome Julian Hodgson Trompowsky DVD. This lot includes: Fighting Chess Move by Move by Colin Crouch: The entire Move by Move series is high quality chess instruction, and this is no different. Crouch annotates many notable games of the last 5 years including the entire Anand Gelfand World Championship match. 289 pgs.

The seller also offers Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player by Lev Alburt and Grandmaster Preparation by Lev Polugayevsky – all together at the starting auction price of $20 US.

Subsequently, he had two more offerings of Angry Girlfriend #2 and #3 books. There she is described as his ex, so he might just as well have kept the books.

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

September 26, 2016

Mark Dvoretsky passed away today. One of the appreciations mentioned his pupils:

His subsequent career was glittering, as his many students – Artur Yusupov, Sergey Dolmatov, Aleksey Dreev, Nana Alexandria, Viorel Bologan, Ernesto Inarkiev, Alexander Motylev, to name but a few – rose to the heights of world chess. Together with Artur Yusupov he held a chess school that attracted the likes of a young Peter Svidler and he went on to author two dozen books, including the seminal Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual.

(Colin McGourty in chess24.com)

which elicited this online comment:

Riemore1
The article lists the greatest students of Mark Dvoretsky...but all of us, and all the chessplayers who will follow us, are and will be his students. I hope there is a chess Valhalla, and our great master is settling in to analyze and play with Morphy, Lasker, Alekhine, Botvinnik and so many more geniuses now gone from us.

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

September 30, 2016

Chess Books and Youth vs Old Age

What happens when you get veteran chess players/writers together? They talk about the game, life and chess books. At least they do when they are John Donaldson, Cyrus Lakdawala, John Watson and Jeremy Silman.

There is a very long article at:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/c...uth-vs-old-age

On my computer it runs 38 screens in length! Quite enjoyable to read.

Some quotes from the article:

Jeremy Silman - I love chess books! Who wouldn’t want a chess book? They are addictive, and once you get one, you will want another and another until you have to buy a larger house. My first chess book, at the age of 12, was "New York 1924" by Alekhine and I almost swooned when I held it in my hand. Ah, what a book! I knew right then and there that I needed more. But how could a 12-year-old get money for books?

After pondering this problem, I went to a nearby swamp, captured various non-poisonous snakes, hid them in the basement (my parents would have freaked out), and sold them as pets. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

John Donaldson - I’m still trying to finish the final volume of a four-part series on Bobby Fischer. The first three are easy to describe: volume one is on Fischer’s 1964 exhibition tour of North America. It’s the third edition of this book and now up to 400 pages. In addition to including many previously unknown games it is also a coming of age story as Bobby turned 21 during the tour and many people shared their memories of him—quite a difference to how he was portrayed in his later years.

The other books are completely new. The second is on all of Bobby’s other exhibitions and non-tournament games while the third, which is over 500 hundred pages, contains all of Fischer’s writings except "My 60 Memorable Games" and Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, both of which are readily available and under copyright. My idea was to gather all of Bobby’s writings in one place. Much of his earlier work was in Chess Life and the American Chess Quarterly so it needed to be converted into algebraic notation. Fischer also wrote various one-off pieces for various publications around the world, which required some detective work to track down.

I mention the page count for the books because it is unclear if they are suitable to appear as physical books. They have many previously unpublished photographs of Bobby and his contemporaries which if published in their entirety in a regular book would likely make them commercially unviable. Right now the first three are available on Kindle and down the road something for the iPad is planned.

Book four is an attempt to answer all the questions I have had about Bobby that were not answered by books like "Profile of a Prodigy" or "Endgame."

Jeremy Silman - Chess Review is absolutely amazing. An unbelievable mix of nostalgia, great analysis, stories, news, and, as John said, incredible photos. I never tire of sitting back and reading an issue or ten. They are completely addictive. Come to think of it, our love for Chess Review shows our age.

[Wayne Komer]

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Great Chess Quotes

October 7, 2016

Metaphorically speaking

The Isle of Man International is on this week, Round Seven just been completed.

Mike Klein at chess.com has never met a metaphor he did not like.

This one today:

The time-lapse video in the Isle of Man's Manx Museum explains that the British Isles took 400 million years to break away from North America and land where they sit today. In contrast, it only took one week for GMs Pavel Eljanov and Fabiano Caruana to break away from the 131 other players at the Chess.com Isle of Man International.

https://www.chess.com/news/eljanov-a...man-field-1471

[Wayne Komer]

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Great Chess Quotes

October 16, 2016

In the semifinal playoffs in Major League Baseball, the Blue Jays have just played their second game against Cleveland and the Chicago Cubs just won their game against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The ESPN write-up is a chess analogy. Generally, such things are a bit silly but here it is:

Joe Maddon 'wins' the craziest of chess matches

Jason Stark, ESPN Senior Writer

CHICAGO -- It was kind of like Anatoly Karpov versus Magnus Carlsen, except with 42,000 chess geniuses second-guessing every move. Here's what actually unfolded at Wrigley Field on a madcap Saturday night:

It was that longtime October grandmaster Joe Maddon versus Dave Roberts, the bold new tactician on the postseason block, with Game 1 of the National League Championship Series riding on every piece they zig-zagged around the Wrigley chess board.

And since the scoreboard said this thing turned out Cubs 8, Dodgers 4, the baseball gods will no doubt override the chess gods and declare Maddon the "winner" of this feverish duel. But did the winning manager really outmaneuver the losing manager? Even he wasn't exactly sure.

"Now that," Maddon said, laughing, on his way out of the postgame interview room, "was some crazy s*"

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/page...s-dodgers-nlcs

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

October 16, 2016

Stephen Moss has a memoir about accepting one’s mediocrity in chess. It is called The Rookie and was recently published.

There is a review of it by Dominic Lawson in Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/book...diocre-it.html

From it:

Losing an important game for us creates a sense of real pain, agonies of remorse and self-reproach.

Moss quotes the late Dutch Grandmaster Jan Donner after he had lost to his local rival, Hans Ree:

‘After I resigned this game with perfect self-control, and solemnly shook hands with my opponent in the best of Anglo-Saxon traditions, I rushed home, where I threw myself on to my bed, howling and screaming, and pulled the blankets over my face.

‘For three days and three nights the Erinyes were after me. Then I got up, dressed, kissed my wife and considered the situation.’

________
The Erinyes (Furies) were three goddesses of vengeance and retribution who punished men for crimes against the natural order

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

October 22, 2016

Alina L’Ami discussing the recent Isle of Man Open, which had grandmasters galore:

No doubt they are owners of machines with hundreds of cores, super talented and are workaholics too. I can agree with that. They are chess gods and gods don't mix with us, mere mortals. They shuffle around in top events, keeping the rating within closed doors. Trust me, it is bloody difficult to enter such an elitist community. But if the top players would descend from their skies, I bet touching the mother earth wouldn't be a soft experience. If they would play Open events, with ambitious, young and tough players, their almighties would start thinking about using a freezer, to prevent their rating from melting down.

And this caption under a photo of Jorden Van Foreest:

One of the first things that experienced chess players do, even before checking the repertoire base, is to look at the birth year of their opponent. Facing a player born in 1999 and rated 2615 sounds like a hard day’s work in the office.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/looking...sle-of-man-1-2

[Wayne Komer]

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Great Chess Quotes

October 29, 2016

Alexander Grischuk on the upcoming World CC Match:

How do you assess the chances of Sergey Karjakin in the match for the world crown?

Well, to be honest, like the chances of our current Russian (ice hockey) team against the Canadians! Our guys need to be in good form, while our opponents shouldn’t be particularly fresh. It’s also very important that the match goes well i.e. in order to beat the Canadians it’s essential for a whole range of factors to coincide. It’s the same with Carlsen – he’s the clear favourite for the upcoming World Championship match, but if Sergey can show his best play, and Magnus suffers a slump, then the battle could be very tense.

https://chess24.com/en/read/news/rus...ev-s-shock-win

http://novosibirskchess.ru/news/alek...gu-v-turnire-/

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

October 29, 2016

From a Washington Post investigation of Donald Trump as a donor to charities:

In 1997, for instance, he was “principal for a day” at a public school in an impoverished area of the Bronx. The chess team was holding a bake sale, Hot & Crusty danishes and croissants. They were $5,000 short of what they needed to travel to a tournament.

Trump had brought something to wow them.

“He handed them a fake million-dollar bill,” said David MacEnulty, a teacher and the chess team’s coach.

The team’s parent volunteers were thrilled.

Then disappointment.

Trump then gave them $200 in real money and drove away in a limousine.

Why just $200?

“I have no idea,” MacEnulty said. “He was about the most clueless person I’ve ever seen in that regard.”

The happy ending, he said, was that a woman read about Trump’s gift in the New York Times, called the school and donated the $5,000. “I am ashamed to be the same species as this man,” MacEnulty recalled her saying.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...aa5_story.html

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

November 1, 2016

I know that it is only the first day of November but it is still easy to give the winner of the chess quote of the year.

I believe it was on the evening that Nakamura had an 87-move draw against Onischuk in the 9th round of the U.S. Championship 2016, he was dining with two friends and tweeted:

Hikaru Nakamura (April 23, 2016) - Not the best result, but good company and good food are the most important things in life!

A great quote and taken up and tweeted by Anish Giri a couple of days later while dining after losing to Harikrishna at Norway Chess:

Anish Giri (April 26, 2016) - Not the best result, but good company and good food are the most important things in life!

Two more recent ones:

Sergey Karjakin (May 6, 2016) - Not the best result, but good company and good food are the most important things in life!

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (Oct. 31, 2016) - Good company and good food are the most important things in life

(The MVL quote after winning the Corsica Circuit by beating Vishy Anand in the final)

As someone else has said:

Poor Nakamura, his wise quote went viral haha
__________

It has come to this then. No matter how you are doing in a tournament, go out and dine with a couple of friends, take an Instagram of the company at the table and tweet it with the Nakamura quote around the world!

[Frank Dixon]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

"I find chess acts as a cold bath for the mind." [Andrew Bonar Law, the only Canadian to serve as Prime Minister of the U.K.] Source: homepage of olimpbase.org.

[Tom O'Donnell]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

"Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation." Max Euwe. This quote appears in the computer game Civilization 6

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

November 5, 2016

From The Couch Potato’s Guide to the World Chess Championship by Ian Rogers

https://new.uschess.org/news/the-cou...-championship/

Games begin at 2pm New York time, so fans will need to have a healthy afternoon snack ready for the second hour of play when the players begin thinking long and hard and the commentators start waffling.

As every New Yorker knows, the healthiest afternoon snack is a New York baked cheesecake. This should be prepared the previous night and may be used as snack food throughout the game.

Making the cake is surprisingly simple, though you’ll need two pounds of cream cheese, plus basics like eggs, caster sugar, cream, butter, plain flour and a cake tin (preferably with a removable base).

(Here follows the recipe for making the cake yourself)

At one slice every five moves, this should last you for the entire game.