Chess teaches " foresight, by having to plan ahead ... vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board ... caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves ... and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life, that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.
- Benjamin Franklin
________________________________________________________
"Sacrifices only prove that someone has blundered."
- Savielly Grigorievich Tartakover
________________________________________________________
"Moral victories do not count."
- Savielly Grigorievich Tartakover
________________________________________________________
"Rooks belong on open files." (Open files are vertical lines [columns] which are unobstructed by your own pieces. They end either at the other end of the board or one of your opponent's pieces.) A notable and very important exception to this rule is the one that says: "Rooks belong behind passed pawns."
________________________________________________________
"The King is a strong piece. Use it."
- Reuben Fine, Grandmaster and Psychoanalyst 1914 - 1993. Author of The Psychology of the Chess Player.
________________________________________________________
"Endgames with Queen and pawns on both sides are among the most difficult in chess."
- Paul Keres, International Grandmaster (1950), born, Estonia 1916, died 1975.
________________________________________________________
"Do not place your pawns on the color of your bishop."
- Reuben Fine, Grandmaster and Psychoanalyst 1914 - 1993. Author of The Psychology of the Chess Player.
________________________________________________________
"The Knight, lacking the Bishop's long range, takes much more time to stop or to win a pawn."
- Eugene Alexandrovich Znosko-Borovsky, Russian-born professional chess player, music and drama critic.
________________________________________________________
"A passed Pawn increases in strength as the number of pieces on the board diminishes."
- Jose´ Raul Capablanca, 1888 -1942, Cuban Grandmaster and World Champion 1921 -1927.
________________________________________________________
"Never is cold reason and clear thinking more necessary than when victory is in sight."
- Eugene Alexandrovich Znosko-Borovsky, Russian-born professional chess player, music and drama critic.
________________________________________________________
"Weak points or holes in the opponent's position must be occupied by pieces not pawns."
- Siegbert Tarrasch, 1862 - 1934, German Master and author of The Game of Chess.
________________________________________________________
"Never move a piece twice before you have moved every piece once."
- Anonymous
________________________________________________________
"The main objective of any operation in an open file is the eventual occupation of the seventh or eighth rank."
- Aaron Nimzovich, 1886 - 1935, Founder of the Hypermodern school of chess, author of My System, ranked 3rd in the world after Capablanca and Alekhine.
________________________________________________________
"A rough and ready rule is that it nearly always pays to advance the front member of a doubled pawn."
- Cecil John Seddon Purdy, 1906 - 1979, Australian Correspondence Grandmaster (1953) and Correspondence Chess World Champion (1953), Founder and Editor of Australian Chess Review He, his father-in-law, and his son have all been champions of Australia.
________________________________________________________
"Three pieces are a mate."
- Eckstrom
________________________________________________________
"Every important exchange of material alters in some way the character of the position and necessitates a change in the strategical and tactical conduct of the game."
- Ludek Pachman, Czech-born (1924) Grandmaster (1954) and faithful Communist until the "Prague Spring" of 1968, when he became strongly and openly hostile to his previously held ideology. He was imprisoned for anti-Communist activity and wrote a book about his political life called Checkmate in Prague in 1975.
________________________________________________________
"In open positions the safety of the King should be the first consideration."
- Richard Reti, 1889 - 1929, known mostly as a contributor to the Hypermodern School, authored Modern Ideas in Chess, (1923) and Masters of the Chessboard - published in New York in 1933. This latter book contains biographical vignettes and annotated games of 23 Masters from Anderssen on.
________________________________________________________
"Your only task in the opening is to reach a playable middlegame."
- Lajos Portisch, (1937) A quiet, positional player sometimes called The Hungarian Petrosian, Portisch is known and respected for his sportsmanship. One of the top ten players of the 70's, he progressed to International Grandmaster in 1961.
________________________________________________________
"Keep freedom of maneuver while hampering your opponent."
- Jose´ Raul Capablanca, 1888 - 1942. World Champion 1921 - 1927. Cuban player who played many of his early games in The Manhattan Chess Club. He beat Lasker to claim the World Champion Title.
________________________________________________________
"The effectiveness of a double-check lies in the fact that of the three possible parries to a check, two are nugatory, namely the capture of the piece giving check and the interposition of a piece. Flight is the one and only resource."
- Aaron Nimzovich, founder of the Hypermodern School of chess. Ranked third in the world after Capablanca and Alekhine. Author of My System, still required reading for the chess student.
________________________________________________________
"A pawn majority on one wing can be of more value than a single passed pawn, provided that the foremost pawn is sufficiently advanced."
- DuMont
________________________________________________________
"When we have the better development and our pieces display more activity, then these circumstances must be exploited at once."
- Kotov
________________________________________________________
"Exchanging pieces and pawns to open a vital diagonal is a deadly device."
- John W. Collins
________________________________________________________
"For a game which is a monument to skill, chess has its moments which, for lack of a better word, can only be described as luck."
- Larry Evans
________________________________________________________
"Never resign. There's always a chance your opponent may drop dead before he mates you."
- Horowitz and Rothenberg, in a chapter called "The Lighter Side of Chess" in The Complete Book of Chess.
________________________________________________________
"Castle, take en passant, promote pawns to minor pieces whenever you can. It helps to create the impression that you have a deep knowledge."
- Horowitz and Rothenberg, in a chapter called "The Lighter Side of Chess" in The Complete Book of Chess.
________________________________________________________
"He who takes the Queen's Knight's pawn will sleep in the streets!"
- Unknown
________________________________________________________
"On the Chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long.
The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie;
the merciless fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite."
- Emanuel Lasker in Lasker's Manual of Chess, 1932.
________________________________________________________
"No one ever won by resigning."
- Anonymous
________________________________________________________
"I have never had the satisfaction of beating a completely healthy opponent."
- Amos Burn
________________________________________________________
Tactical success in chess depends partly on knowing when to apply which maxim or tip. These tips are general heuristic principles or rules of thumb. It takes experience to recognize when a tip should or shouldn't be applied and which maxim should be used in any particular situation. Some tips even seem contradictory:
"Always check, it may be mate"
- Horowitz
"Refrain from useless checks."
- Larry Evans
________________________________________________________
On Creativity:
" Not all artists may be chess players, but all chess players are artists. "
- Marcel Duchamp (1952)
"The creative side of the game does not matter, the point is the King."
- Paul Keres
________________________________________________________
"Chess is a creative process. Its purpose is to find the truth. To discover the truth, you must be uncompromising. You must be brave."
- Bruce Pandolfini
________________________________________________________
"Chess, like any creative activity, can exist only through the combined efforts of those who have creative talent, and those who have the ability to organize their creative work."
- Mikhail Botvinnik.
________________________________________________________
*A final thought concerning creativity and chess:
"Contemporary chess is now entering a new stage...of its development, with an even greater wealth of internal and external substance. It would be too much to reject the practical side too quickly for the sake of analytical and romantic creativity. I am sure the further development of chess will move along a harmonious blending of what seem at first glance to be mutually exclusive principles."
- Kasparov, 1/20/83"
________________________________________________________
"The tactician must know what to do whenever something needs doing; the strategist must know what to do when nothing needs doing".
- Savielly Tartakover (1887-1956).
________________________________________________________
"...only the player with the initiative has the right to attack".
- William Steinitz
________________________________________________________
"If you see the good move, look for the better one".
- Emanuel Lasker
________________________________________________________
Some extra treats, author unknown:
Moments when you should sense DANGER in chess:
1. There has been a change in the pawn structure. Your opponent has eight and you don't have any.
2. Your opponent begins to throw pawns at your eyes.
3. You have a position won but your opponent has a gun.
4. The Director tells you not to bother turning in your scoresheet after the game
5 Before the game begins you notice your opponents 1st initials are 'GM'.
6. After completing your development you sense your opponent playing the endgame.
7. Just as you make your opening move your opponent announces mate in eleven.
8. You don't control any squares at all.
9. Your draw offer sends all the people watching your game into uncontrollable laughter.
10. Your opponent has three bishops.
________________________________________________________
"After giving a student the basic mating patterns and strategies you must begin giving them advanced concepts. At first these ideas will not make sense, many players will have a vague idea of what you are talking about but nothing more. Even a fragmented understanding of these concepts will prove useful though, and eventually they will improve as these lessons are assimilated by repetition and example."
- Jeremy Silman
________________________________________________________
"The first principle of attack: Don't let the opponent develop!"
- Reuben Fine
________________________________________________________
"The older I grow, the more I value Pawns."
- Paul Keres,
International Grandmaster (1950), born, Estonia 1916, died 1975
________________________________________________________
Woody Allen turned his wit towards chess in The Gossage-Varabedian Papers reproducing the letters of a mythical correspondence match. In this essay he captured the essence of chessplayers' personalities. Gossage, finding himself in an indefensible position, claims that a communication mix-up is responsible for the state of his game. His letters provide a few memorable quotes. Here, he attempts to attribute the mistake to his opponent :
"...heaven knows, we all make mistakes. That's life--and chess."
- In a subsequent letter, he appended this postscript:
"PS: I am enclosing a diagram showing exactly how the board now looks, for your edification in your closing play. As you can see, your king is trapped, unguarded and alone in the center.
Best to you.
- G."
from Woody Allen's Getting Even published in 1971 by Random House
________________________________________________________
"Who is your opponent tonight?"
"Tonight I am playing against the Black pieces"
A. Rubenstein
________________________________________________________
"To avoid losing a piece, many a person has lost the game."
- Tartakover
________________________________________________________
"If you want to lose a miniature, then here are three helpful tips. First of all, it is a big help if you are Black: losing with White in under 20 moves requires a special talent, which few possess. Secondly, choose a provocative opening, for example an opening in which you try to realize strategic ambitions, but at the cost of backward development and delayed castling. Thirdly, if something goes slightly wrong, don't reconcile yourself to defending a bad position - seek a tactical solution instead! Don't worry about the fact that tactics are bound to favor the better developed side; just go ahead anyway. Follow this advice and at least you will get home early."
- Nunn
________________________________________________________
"For me, chess is life and every game is like a new life. Every chess player gets to live many lives in one lifetime."
- Eduard Gufeld
________________________________________________________
"One bad move nullifies forty good ones."
- Horowitz
________________________________________________________
On the endgame:
"The Queen's-side majority, the outside passed Pawn, the 'good' and 'bad' Bishop have all become standard reference terms. Many players still commit the error of extrapolating these notions to the middlegame where in most cases endgame principles are reversed. Alekhine warned that a Queen's-side majority can be an advantage in the ending but that a central majority is far more important in the middlegame. ...The outside passed Pawn is more of a weakness in the middlegame when the fight is concentrated on the centre and King's side."
- Suba
________________________________________________________
"Let us enumerate again the ways of playing that are specific to the endgame phase:
1.
Think in terms of schemes
2.Do not be in a hurry
3.Bring the King as quickly as possible to the centre of the board."
- Kotov
________________________________________________________
"It is often supposed that, apart from their 'extraordinary powers of memory', expert players have phenomenal powers of calculation. The beginner believes that experts can calculate dozens of moves ahead and he will lose to them only because he cannot calculate ahead so far. Yet this is utter nonsense. From my own experience I can say that Grandmasters do not do an inordinate amount of calculating. Tests (notably de Groot's experiments) support me in this claim. If anything, Grandmasters often consider fewer alternatives; they tend not to look at as many possible moves as weaker players do. And so, perversely, chess skill often seems to reflect the ability to avoid calculations. It is, in truth, not clear that chess is a game of calculation. Of course there are times when intense calculation is called for, and often the master is better at dealing with these situations than the amateur. No wonder, he has had more practice than the amateur, but all the same his innate calculating ability need not be any greater. Most of the time it is something quite different that is required in chess, something more akin to 'understanding' or 'insight'. "
- Norwood
________________________________________________________
"A chess game is divided into three stages: the first, when you hope you have the advantage, the second when you believe you have an advantage, and the third...when you know you're going to lose!"
- Tartakover
________________________________________________________
"Up to this point White has been following well-known analysis. But now he makes a fatal error: he begins to use his own head."
- S. Tarrasch
________________________________________________________
In an article about personality types associated with styles of post-game analyses, GM Andy Soltis described:
The Sufferer:
He agonizes rather than analyzes,
"How did I fail to win this?" he asks anyone within earshot.
"What's wrong with me?"
The Sufferer is a spiritual descendant of Aaron Nimzovich, who after one game is alleged to have exclaimed,
"How can I lose to this idiot!"
- Chess Life, May 1994 (p. 16)
________________________________________________________
"The chessplayer's greatest art lies in creating positions in which the normal relative values cease to exist."
- Mikhail Botvinnik
________________________________________________________
"Concentrate on material gain. Whatever your opponent gives, you take, unless you see a good reason not to."
- Bobby Fischer
________________________________________________________
"Weaknesses of character are normally shown in a game of chess."
- World Champion Garry Kasparov.
________________________________________________________
"."
- Deep Blue.
________________________________________________________
"Chess is the only sport where you remain competitive after sixty."
- Dr. Eugene Martinovsky
________________________________________________________
"No chess player sleeps well."
- H. G. Wells
________________________________________________________
"A win by an unsound combination, however showy, fills me with artistic horror."
- Wilhelm Steinitz
________________________________________________________
"So although I think I did see some signs of intelligence {in Deep Blue], it is a weird kind, an inefficient, inflexible kind that makes me think I have a few years left."
- Garry Kasparov in Time, March 25, 1996.
________________________________________________________
"Chicks don't love me anymore. If girls are interested in me, they are probably after superficial things, like my opening knowledge, my Modern Benonis ... I don't think people appreciate the inner depths of my personality."
- GM David Norwood
________________________________________________________
"These days I understand there are two kinds of equal positions - equal positions you like to play and equal positions you can't stand the sight of."
-GM Viswanathan Anand
________________________________________________________
"KIBITZER: One who gives good advice to your opponent."
- Andy Soltis
________________________________________________________
"Perhaps chess is useful for the banal reason that it demonstrates to children that thinking is not boring."
- GM David Norwood
________________________________________________________
"I have had to work long and hard to eradicate the dangerous delusion that, in a bad position, I could always, or nearly always, conjure up some unexpected combination to extricate me from my difficulties."
- Alexander Alekhine
________________________________________________________
