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Chessville
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New Additions - Part Four New quotes that we haven't even had time to categorize yet!
That would be pointless. He is much too strong. – Vladimir Kramnik (on Steinitz challenging God to a chess game) “Good Enough" is the enemy of excellence. – Source Unknown Such a unique, such an ingenious game must produce its own special matadors. – Stefan Zweig How hard it is to understand a man who, through using a new opening, moving the knight instead of the pawn, achieves a feat, and his tiny little scrap of immortality tucked away in a chess book reference – a man, an intelligent man, who without losing his reason, for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, concentrates all his mental energy over and over again on the ludicrous exercise of maneuvering into a corner a wooden king on a wooden board! – Stefan Zweig Soviet Grandmasters privately scoffed at Karpov’s chances in 1975. Most pundits believed he would lose… and lose badly. – Lev Alburt (on Karpov’s chances against Fischer) Karpov knew he could hardly draw a game with Fischer, never mind winning one or two games. His only chance was to disrupt the match. So a whole arsenal of tricks was worked out, designed to upset the sensitive American, unaccustomed to such methods. – Lev Alburt Bobby was afraid that if he had defended against Karpov in 1975, the Russians would have had him murdered. – Pal Benko Finally America produces its greatest chess genius, and he turns out to be just a stubborn boy. – Hans Kmoch (on Fischer) I have to change my way of playing from normal chess. What matters is to develop the most unusual tactics possible. I have to keep the computer from using its calculating skills. And I will do this while provoking moves that it doesn't understand. The machine has to feel uncomfortable, so to speak. – Vladimir Kramnik Computers are just street muggers. They love to grab pieces whenever there is a chance to do so. I wouldn't have the slightest chance in a fast game. A computer isn't capable, in the same way a human is, to put knowledge into context. Intuition is a gift that is totally foreign to a machine and where problems can arise for it. Sometimes I just have a gut feeling about which move I must make. I just feel it - and my feelings have rarely let me down. – Vladimir Kramnik The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it. – Henry Hazlitt Short was struttin’ his hot stuff with some of the attractive ladies in attendance. They somehow managed to resist his studly hands-in-pockets-with-shoulders-hunched-in mating stance as he worked his mojo. – D. Ebrahim Al Mannai (on Nigel Short in attendance at the pre-match festivities for the Kramnik-Deep Fritz match in Bahrain) According to Nigel “Romeo” Short, this move is more solid than 15…b5, which he describes as being similar to a playboy’s concept of marriage: ‘too committal’. – D. Ebrahim Al Mannai Before the first game I was a little bit worried because playing versus a human being, I have my opponent opposite me and it's a kind of energy that goes between us. But today there was no human being and there was no energy. It's kind of a black hole. But I discovered a new source of energy because I was playing against a computer and the audience – human beings - everybody really wanted me to crush the computer, because we all have something in common, being human. Thank you very much for this enormous energy supply. – Garry Kasparov (after defeating Deep Thought in 1989) This is not just about a chess match. This is really about the future - about how we will be using computers to help us live our lives in the future. – Garry Kasparov (on his match against Deep Blue) We stand at the brief corona of an eclipse - the eclipse of certain human mastery by machines that humans have created. How well Kasparov does in outwitting IBM's monster might be an early indication of how well our species might maintain its identity, let alone its superiority, in the years and centuries to come. – Steven Levy (on the ’97 Kasparov-Deep Blue match) I don't think that any database in the Pentagon is as well protected as Deep Blue. – Garry Kasparov Forget the prize money. The fate of humanity is on the line, at least in Garry Kasparov's head. – Maurice Ashley (on the final game of the ’97 Kasparov-Deep Blue match) Play competitive chess and we shall see if this machine is a chess prodigy. I think it is time for Deep Blue to start playing real chess. I personally assure you, everybody here, that if Deep Blue starts playing competitive chess, I personally guarantee you I'll tear it to pieces without question. However many players they hire. They can hire the entire Grandmaster force of the United States of America. It will not help because we will know how the machine plays. – Garry Kasparov Put it this way, the Deep Blue supercomputer that beat Kasparov in 1997 weighed 1.4 tons, was over 6 ft high and needed 20 people to keep it running. The new Deep Fritz can run on a laptop. Even on a fast desktop machine it will be able to achieve the playing level of any incarnation of Deep Blue. I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to what it is going to do to Kramnik. – Frederic Friedel You know when and what part of winning a game of chess I love the most? It's not at the end of the game by rule, but at that singularly wonderful moment when you see that look of defeat come over your opponents face. You know the one... that sudden surprised or astonished look of disbelief that one only gets to enjoy once in a great while no matter how many games you win... because winning like that is so rare! – Robert Meek Most arguments about chess consist very largely of one person arguing that all the other participants in the discussion are jackasses. He usually proves it, and he also usually proves that he is one himself. – Adapted from H. L. Mencken This is the way I play. I always search for the best move, but this way there is a chance to lose. A chance for greatness and a chance for disaster. – Garry Kasparov Bobby was a role model, a chess player loved for his smile, his secret power, for moves that were thrilling and sexy. There were chess groupies who craved Bobby but settled for sallow preoccupied masters who spent their days poring over dense books in clubs and coffee shops. It was the time of Muhammed Ali, Joe Namath, the Beatles, and Bobby Fischer. – Fred Waitzkin (on the early 70’s) He is a creature of darkness. – Garry Kasparov (on Karpov) He is morally and politically evil - a symbol of the communist system. – Garry Kasparov (on Karpov) Chess is the most beautiful and reasonable of all games. – Mme de Sevigne Chess is an exercise full of delights. – Arthur Saul Chess is an earnest exercise of the mind. – Thomas Cogan Chess is the art of battle for the victorious battle of art. – Saviely Tartakower Intuition and profound ideas win chess games at the highest level, not counting. – Garry Kasparov As fate would have it, my three-foot son could see where his father was blind. Within days (of learning to play), it was clear that Josh could calculate more quickly and more accurately than I could. He had a sense for where to place his knights and bishops so that they worked together to make threats. Try as hard as I might, my pieces were simply here and there, weak isolated soldiers fighting to survive, while Josh’s were helping one another and ultimately closing in on my king - felt like my throat. Clever combinations played themselves out beneath Josh’s dimpled hand while I strained to defend. – Fred Waitzkin While other fathers fantasized big-time careers for their boys in baseball and basketball, I dreamed of my son becoming a grandmaster. – Fred Waitzkin Just because a man was champion for many years does not necessarily mean that he was a good player. – Bobby Fischer When the queens come off the board, the character of the game shifts, and the master must change his demeanor as well as his technique. The Marines are no longer storming the hill. The endgame is chilly and minimalist, and to play effectively in this new terrain, the heedless attacker must quiet himself and be patient, precise, and perhaps a little detached. – Fred Waitzkin The great endgame player can be defined by his ability to read the meaning of disengagement and empty space. He judges the importance of unoccupied squares, of the critical number of spaces separating the two kings, of the number of steps a king must traverse along empty pathways to achieve a goal that would be a complete mystery to an amateur. In this sparse terrain, pieces yield space to edge around one another. But the implications of these austere and seemingly indirect moves are often more grave than in the middlegame, where the loss of a tempo - when a player is stalled from his plan for a move - frequently means no more than the loss of initiative in a hectic battle. A player can struggle back from middlegame errors. But the loss of a tempo or an inaccurate move in the endgame is likely the end of the game; you lose. – Fred Waitzkin When Bobby retired to begin his dark political work, chess seemed to dry up in the United States. – Fred Waitzkin As a competitive chess player in my younger days, when I played a beautiful game, I wanted to frame it and put it on the wall. Chess is also a sport because it is incredibly mentally and physically demanding. That computers play it better does not lessen any of the enjoyment that we can get from the game. – Jonathan Schaeffer So, who's winning? – Countless would-be comedians upon seeing a lone chessplayer analyzing at the board Chess is to a considerable extent about pattern recognition. The more patterns you have firmly fixed in your memory, the more effective you are likely to be at the chessboard. – John Nunn Kasparov had been unable to overwhelm Anatoly Karpov in their previous four championship bouts, each of them exhausting and very competitive, which in aggregate encompassed 120 games, about 600 hours of play - if you can call it play to plot the demise of another man's spiritual and psychological well-being. In 120 games, Kasparov had managed to win only a single game more than Karpov. Incredible. There had never been such a competition in all of professional sports: so many encounters, so many hours, so much on the line, so much hatred seeping from a game into life and then back into a game. – Fred Waitzkin (in 1990 just before the start of the fifth Kasparov-Karpov match) I'm going to crush him this time! – Garry Kasparov (on his 1990 world championship match with Karpov) A classic is a book, which people praise and don't read. – Mark Twain The public must come to see that chess is a violent sport! The stakes are very high in an important chess game. When you beat your opponent you destroy his ego; for a time you make him lose confidence in himself as a person. If the general public understood that chess players were plotting to crush one another, don’t you think they’d be interested? In this match you’ll feel it. The two greatest intellects in the chess world trying to destroy one another. People in the theater will be shivering. – Garry Kasparov (on his 1990 world championship match with Karpov) It seemed to Kasparov that he had spent half of his twenty-seven years and sacrificed much of his life’s joy trying to rid himself of this sallow, physically frail man who stuck to him like a shadow. Half a lifetime sitting across from Karpov, whom he loathed, toes practically touching, conceiving his finest ideas - which chess players would surely revere 100 years from today - while smelling Karpov’s smells, listening to his digestion or to the incanting sound of Karpov’s counting while he calculated variations, glimpsing the quivering of Karpov’s stretched, nerve-wracked face when he was losing, or his preening, apple-cheeked self-admiration when he was winning. Half a lifetime watching closely for Karpov’s mood swings as crucial clues to the game and to Kasparov’s own well-being, for if Kasparov won, he would feel like a god afterwards, and if he lost, his dejection, the blackness and rage closing upon him, would resist all forms of consolation from his friends, his wife, his mother. Such depths of despair and humiliation! – Fred Waitzkin (on the 1990 Kasparov-Karpov match) You must ask my father. I am only the player. – Gata Kamsky It would be wrong to say that a creatively concrete approach to the position lessens the influence of the rules of chess or contradicts them. The whole point is that in any given position, the contradiction of any rules (or generalities) occurs only at the price of the reaffirmation and victory of other ones. Chess dogmatism does not occur only when: 1) established rules are followed without regard for circumstances, without consideration of all the concrete peculiarities of the position; it also occurs when: 2) the evaluation of a particular position is made primarily on the basis of only the obvious, the already known and established rules and generalizations. – Isaac Lipnitsky Possession of the initiative sometimes can outweigh the presence of a bad bishop - in fact, this bishop can sometimes take an active part in an attack. And on the defense, as GM Suba once noted, sometimes “a bad bishop defends good pawns” (although it would be more accurate to say “important” or “necessary” pawns), and thus becomes a valuable piece, which the stronger side is forced to exchange in order to break through the defense. – Mark Dvoretsky In our day too, there are some authors who assert that the dynamic approach characteristic of modern chess has in effect made general rules and principles useless for the purpose of making decisions in the majority of concrete positions. This point of view has probably arisen at least partly from the realization that, when we are playing the game, we are in fact occupied with concrete analysis of the position, and almost never recall those abstract principles. So why do we need them at all? A thorough acquaintance with the general principles, techniques and methods enriches and sharpens our intuition. In the course of play, our feelings suggest moves, which correspond to the principles (which we examined earlier), which are active in the position; the analysis of these possibilities or those ideas helps us to guess the proper line to take, to find the concrete solution. And the more “learned” the player, other things being equal, the more successfully and surely his intuition will operate. – Mark Dvoretsky Perhaps the solution to the mystery of bad bishops is that bishops retain the qualities of their owners, so stronger players have better bishops than weaker players. But even this cannot always be true. – Boris Gulko Playing chess gives us a chance to start out life over again, and this time, no one has more money than us, no one is more beautiful, no one lives in a better neighborhood, and we all go to the same school. Other than having the first move, and this benefit is shared equally, no one starts with any unfair advantage. – Source Unknown From a practical standpoint, it’s much better to have well explained logically concluded analysis that’s somewhat flawed than it is to have something that’s been gone over ten times by John Nunn on the computer, that doesn’t have any flaws in it, but may be uninspired and uninteresting. Go to a used bookstore, get a nice collection of annotated games, and go crazy. Buy Vukovic’s The Art of Attack, which people will say is horribly flawed with all these errors in the combinations…who cares. Again, what’s the value to you as a chessplayer? It’s [the book] making you think, you working through the stuff. It’s not that you’re memorizing it. You have to think. So anything that will get you to think and work on your tactics, that’s the value. – Mig Greengard
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