Great chess quotes

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

November 20, 2016

We have recently seen both Maurice Ashley and Magnus Carlsen playing incognito outdoors in New York City.

See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5vnpOp0U_g

http://forum.chesstalk.com/showthrea...ident-hustlers

This quote from chess24.com today:

Hard not to feel a bit sad for all the chess hustlers in New York parks now getting hustled by visiting professionals :)

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

November 15, 2016

GMs Peter Svidler and Eric Hansen were commentating Game 3 of the 2016 WCC for chess24.com online.

They monitor the chatline from time to time and a chat came up describing Eric as a union between James Bond and a Toblerone. The guys collapsed in hysterics.
__________

Toblerone bars have chunky chocolate triangles standing on a flat strip. Recently, the company has changed the design with great spaces now between the triangles where they were once clustered together. This economic change is possibly due to the fall in the value of the British pound due to Brexit. The British public is outraged.

The reference then might mean in Eric they are getting a cut-rate James Bond. Whatever it means, Peter and Eric found it hilarious!
_________

November 17 - The reference to Toblerone might be due to Eric's haircut. This tweet today during Game 5 of the WCC - Eric, do you think having a triangular head helps with calculations?

[Wayne Komer]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

Great Chess Quotes

November 9, 2016

The blurb for a forthcoming sex-chess novel by a British Women’s Chess Champion.

Expected Release: Late November 2016

The Mating Game by Jovanka Houska & James Essinger

A new romance novel from the British Women's Chess Champion

Meet Ivana (‘call me Vanny’) Jones, a sexy, beautiful, warm-hearted professional chess-player. She has a problem: she’s only attracted to guys who can beat her… so what’s she to do when a chess amateur, the Russian billionaire Boris Bogolyubov, proposes marriage?

Not only that, but as Vanny tries to achieve her lifelong dream of becoming a chess grandmaster, she develops a crush on Norwegian sex-god Sven while also falling for a stunning and adoring Frenchwoman. Meanwhile, Vanny’s hoping a revolutionary new drug treatment will save her best friend Charlotte’s life.

Set in London, Monaco, Budapest, Helsinki, Odessa, New York… and Leicester, this sparkily written, passionate, emotional and entertaining novel will rock your boat… even if you’ve never shouted ‘Checkmate!’

About the Authors

Jovanka Houska is the current British Women’s Chess Champion, an international chess master and one of the world’s leading women chess-players. She has won many international tournaments and is a prolific author of books about chess. She also loves travelling to remote islands, yoga, gardening, and enjoys many of the things Vanny likes.

James Essinger is a club-strength chess-player and a writer. Ada’s Algorithm, his biography of computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, has been published in the UK and the US and in a Spanish edition, and is to be filmed. He’s never lost at chess to Jovanka, but only because he’s too scared to play her.
_________

On the EC Forum, writers were trying to come up with other sexy chess titles and these made the list:

64 Shades of Grey
Bobby Fischer – My 60 Memorable Dames
The Big Book of Busts by John Watson and Eric Schiller
Sicilian Love (Polugaevsky)
The Chess Player's Bedside Book

[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.

[Tom O'Donnell]

Re: Great Chess Quotes

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

[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.

[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!

[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

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 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]

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 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 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]

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]

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.