Quotes About Chess Players

#1. It's easy for me to get along with chess players. Even though we are all very different, we have chess in common.

Magnus Carlsen

#2. Capablanca was among the greatest of chess players, but not because of his endgame. His trick was to keep his openings simple, and then play with such brilliance in the middlegame that the game was decided - even though his ooponent didn't always know it - before they arrived at the ending.

Bobby Fischer

#3. I think that by and large chess players have been very kind. Like I said there have been a few incidents, but they certainly didn't serve to bring me down any.

Maurice Ashley

#4. Like dogs who sniff each other when meeting, chess players have a ritual at first acquaintance: they sit down to play speed chess.

Anatoly Karpov

#5. For us chess players the language of artist is something natural.

Vladimir Kramnik

#6. The only thing Chess players have in common is Chess.

Lodewijk Prins

#7. Chess has given me a lot more than I could ask for. I have been able to feel special, travel the world and do what I truly enjoy. Moreover, chess players love being their own boss and hate having to wake up early!

Viswanathan Anand

#8. Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

James Gleick

#9. Chess as a sport requires a lot of mental stamina, and this is what that makes it different from a physical sport. Chess players have a unique ability of taking in a lot of information and remembering relevant bits. So, memory and mental stamina are the key attributes.

Viswanathan Anand

#10. When top-level chess players look at a board, they see words, not letters. Instead of seeing twenty-five pieces, they may see just five or six groups of pieces. That's why it's easy for them to remember where all the pieces are.

Geoff Colvin

#11. G. K. Chesterton says chess players go crazy, not poets. I think he is right.

Donald Miller

#12. Chess players do not care about the pawns. They sacrifice the least powerful so they can hold on to their power.Your leaders play chess with your lives,but what the world does not yet know is that someone else whispers the moves as they play...

Catherine Linka

#13. Most chess players know, thanks to the study of master games, that two bishops are stronger than two knights or than bishop and knight, though very few know the reason for this advantage and how to turn it to account.

Richard Reti

#14. It is a well known fact that almost all the outstanding chess-players have been first-class analysts.

Mikhail Botvinnik

#15. Emotional instability can be one of the factors giving rise to a failure by chess players in important duels. Under the influence of surging emotions (and not necessarily negative ones) we sometimes lose concentration and stop objectively evaluating the events that are taking place on the board.

Mark Dvoretsky

#16. Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general.

Marcel Duchamp

#17. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

G.K. Chesterton

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#19. The Soviet Union was an exception, but even there chess players were not rich. Only Fischer changed that.

Boris Spassky

#20. India and China are improving by leaps and bounds and it will be their chess players who will lead the revolution of the XXI century.

Judit Polgar

#21. Chess-players are so unsociable, they are no company for any but themselves.

Anne Bronte

#22. Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they've beaten our top human chess champions.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#23. I have known many chess players, but among them there has been only one genius - Capablanca!

Emanuel Lasker

#24. All chess players know what a combination is. Whether one makes it oneself, or is its victim, or reads of it, it stands out from the rest of the game and stirs one's admiration.

Eugene Znosko-Borovsky

#25. Bobby Fischer's current state of mind is indeed a tragedy. One of the worlds greatest Chess players - the pride and sorrow of American Chess

Frank Brady

#26. Far more people make a living as professional chess players today than ever before. Thanks partly to the availability of computer programs and online matches, there has been a mini-boom in chess interest among young people in many countries.

Kenneth Rogoff

#27. By all means examine the games of the great chess players, but don't swallow them whole. Their games are valuable not for their separate moves, but for their vision of chess, their way of thinking.

Anatoly Karpov

#28. Many Chess players were surprised when after the game, Fischer quietly explained: 'I had already analyzed this possibility' in a position which I thought was not possible to foresee from the opening

Mikhail Tal

#29. All Chess players should have a hobby

Savielly Tartakower

#30. Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.

Garry Kasparov

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

Anatoly Karpov

#32. A lot of these ideas are built under wrong presumptions which officials have that chess players are lazy bastards whose sole idea is to deceive (the) public and to make short draws and go home. It's not true. It's a lie.

Boris Gelfand

#33. Bobby Fischer was hugely important for the American chess community because it put chess on the map - he made it possible for other chess players to make a living.

Liz Garbus

#34. Nowadays the dynamic element is more important in chess - players more often sacrifice material to obtain dynamic compensation.

Boris Spassky

#35. Not infrequently ... the theoretical is a synonym of the stereotyped. For the 'theoretical' in chess is nothing more than that which can be found in the textbooks and to which players try to conform because they cannot think up anything better or equal, anything original.

Mikhail Chigorin

#36. Professional players work almost every day, for hours on end, and the emphasis is on the word 'work.' It can be with a partner or it can be alone, but professional chess is always a pursuit of something new and surprising.

Viswanathan Anand

#37. I'll always take Scrabble and chess if I'm going filming. But I do have the Scrabble dictionary, which can be infuriating for other players.

Saffron Burrows

#38. When you're good at something, you should continue to do it. Too many players have stopped at a relatively young age ...

Jan Timman

#39. Young players calculate everything, a requirement of their relative inexperience.

Samuel Reshevsky

#40. You can't overestimate the importance of psychology in chess, and as much as some players try to downplay it, I believe that winning requires a constant and strong psychology not just at the board but in every aspect of your life.

Garry Kasparov

#41. Chess is the only game greater than its players.

Tim Rice

#42. And so without our primordial attachments to others, what would we be?
Evidently, we would be the players of a game, one that resembled a giant chess match, with our fellow human beings as the rooks, the knights, and the pawns. For this is the essence of sociopathic behavior, and desire.

Martha Stout

#43. I claim that nothing else is so effective in encouraging the growth of chess strength as such independent analysis, both of the games of the great players and your own.

Mikhail Botvinnik

#44. None of the great players has been so incomprehensible to the majority of amateurs and even masters, as Emanuel Lasker.

Jose Raul Capablanca

#45. Chess is like a language, the top players are very fluent at it. Talent can be developed scientifically but you have to find first what you are good at.

Viswanathan Anand

#46. In chess so much depends on opening theory, so the champions before the last century did not know as much as I do and other players do about opening theory. So if you just brought them back from the dead they wouldn't do well. They'd get bad openings.

Bobby Fischer

#47. First-class players lose to second-class players because second-class players sometimes play a first-class game

Siegbert Tarrasch

#48. Chess books should be used as we use glasses: to assist the sight, although some players make use of them as if they thought they conferred sight

Jose Raul Capablanca

#49. In chess one cannot control everything. Sometimes a game takes an unexpected turn, in which beauty begins to emerge. Both players are always instrumental in this.

Vladimir Kramnik

#50. Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won.

Alexander Alekhine

#51. 19.Rxc7N. There comes the novetly! [sic] Actually, the impression I had is that both players had more or less analyzed the rest of the game.

Romain Edouard

#52. Lack of proper endgame technique allows many players to escape from lost positions, even without any spectacular play on their part.

Leonid Shamkovich

#53. Nowadays there is more dynamism in chess, modern players like to take the initiative. Usually they are poor defenders though.

Boris Spassky

#54. If you have a strong opponent, a competition is stimulating. I am generally most open to ideas when I have had a bad result. In chess, too, players specialise. This specialty then becomes an entry barrier.

Viswanathan Anand

#55. There are tough players and nice guys, and I'm a tough player

Bobby Fischer

#56. I didn't know so well chess theory, the theory of chess openings. And so, of course I knew the theory, but not on the level of the best players, so this was my ... this was always my weakness.

Anatoly Karpov

#57. One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.

Anatol Rapoport

#58. When humans team up with computers to play chess, the humans who do best are not necessarily the strongest players. They're the ones who are modest and who know when to listen to the computer. Often, what the human adds is knowledge of when the computer needs to look more deeply.

Tyler Cowen

#59. Once in a Moscow chess club I saw how two first-category players knocked pieces off the board as they were exchanged, so that the pieces fell onto the floor. It was as if they were playing skittles and not chess!

Alexander Kotov

#60. Chess continues to advance over time, so the players of the future will inevitably surpass me in the quality of their play, assuming the rules and regulations allow them to play serious chess. But it will likely be a long time before anyone spends 20 consecutive years as number, one as I did.

Garry Kasparov

#61. A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough.

Garry Kasparov

#62. In our small chess community in Marylebone it would be mock modesty on my part to deny that I have built up for myself a considerable name without ever actually having won a single game. Even the best players are sometimes beaten, and that is precisely what happens to me.

Stephen Potter

#63. Human affairs are like a chess-game: only those who do not take it seriously can be called good players. Life is like an earthen pot: only when it is shattered, does it manifest its emptiness.

Seneca The Younger

#64. We want more women players to take up chess. There are few participants at the national level and hope it will grow.

Viswanathan Anand

#65. In order to become a grandmaster class player whose understanding of chess is superior to the thousands of ordinary players, you have to develop within yourself a large number of qualities, the qualities of an artistic creator, a calculating practitioner, a cold calm competitor.

Alexander Kotov

#66. Anyone who wishes to learn how to play chess well must make himself or herself thoroughly conversant with the play in positions where the players have castled on opposite sides.

Alexander Kotov