Kasparov Chess Quotes & Sayings

Playing black, I put great stake in the Ruy Lopez: I liked it, feel it, and understand it; in matches with Hjartarson and Timman it served me well. - on preparing for World Championship versus Garry Kasparov — Anatoly Karpov

The human mind isn't a computer; it cannot progress in an orderly fashion down a list of candidate moves and rank them by a score down to the hundredth of a pawn the way a chess machine does. Even the most disciplined human mind wanders in the heat of competition. This is both a weakness and a strength of human cognition. Sometimes these undisciplined wanderings only weaken your analysis. Other times they lead to inspiration, to beautiful or paradoxical moves that were not on your initial list of candidates. — Garry Kasparov

Throughout my chess career I sought out new challenges, looking for things no one had done before. — Garry Kasparov

Ultimately, what separates a Winner from a Loser at the Grandmaster level is the Willingness to do the Unthinkable. — Garry Kasparov

There can be no finer example of the inspiring powers of competition to shatter the status quo than Hungary's Judit Polgar. — Garry Kasparov

Few things are as psychologically brutal as chess. — Garry Kasparov

I learned that fighting on the chess board could also have an impact on the political climate in the country. — Garry Kasparov

Nowadays games immediately appear on the Internet and thus the life of novelties is measured in hours. Modern professionals do not have the right to be forgetful - it is 'life threatening'. — Garry Kasparov

Next to the intellectual stimulation of chess, the educational value is of great importance. Chess teaches logic, imagination, self-discipline, and determination. — Garry Kasparov

A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough. — Garry Kasparov

Chess is mental torture. — Garry Kasparov

I want to serve chess through games, books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world. — Garry Kasparov

If, in our first match for the world champion's title, I had managed to make the score 6-0, there would have been no Kasparov as a good chess player at all. — Anatoly Karpov

My opponent is Short and the match will be short. — Garry Kasparov

In chess, we have styles - like in any other field. There are also fashions in the kinds of systems that people play. So I'm trying to know my opponent as much as possible. — Garry Kasparov

Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles — Garry Kasparov

For me, chess is a language, and if it's not my native tongue, it is one I learned via the immersion method at a young age. — Garry Kasparov

In chess the rules are fixed and the outcome is unpredictable, whereas in Putin's Russia the rules are unpredictable and the outcome is fixed. — Garry Kasparov

Like Dvoretsky, I think that (all other things being equal), the analytical method of studying chess must give you a colossal advantage over the chess pragmatist, and that there can be no certainty in chess without analysis. I personally acquired these views from my sessions with Mikhail Botvinnik, and they laid the foundations of my chess-playing life. — Garry Kasparov

A game of chess holds many secrets. Fortunately! That is why we cannot clearly state whether chess is science, art, or a sport. — Garry Kasparov

By this measure (on the gap between Fischer & his contemporaries), I consider him the greatest world champion — Garry Kasparov

One does not succeed by sticking to convention. — Garry Kasparov

His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century. — Garry Kasparov

Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count ... Tripping and falling into a well on your way to the field of battle is not the same thing as dying in it ... Deep Blue is only itself out of book; prior to that it is nothing. Just the ghosts of the game itself. — Brian Christian

Thanks to the Polgars the adjective 'men's' before events and the 'affirmative action' women's titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms. — Garry Kasparov

Capablanca possessed an amazing ability to quickly see into a position and intuitively grasp its main features. His style, one of the purest, most crystal-clear in the entire history of chess, astonishes one with his logic. — Garry Kasparov

Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time. — Garry Kasparov

I honestly don't read that much. Obviously I read chess books - in terms of favorites, Kasparov's 'My Great Predecessors' is pretty good. — Magnus Carlsen

There are fixed rules in chess, and no one knows how the game will end. — Garry Kasparov

In an age when schools are facing significant budgetary restraints, there is a greater need than ever to make chess available to as many students as possible. We've assembled the very best in chess education to develop a complete chess curriculum - K through 12. We've designed a program that encourages creativity, instills self-discipline and offers hope and a feeling of accomplishment to millions of children. — Garry Kasparov

Inevitably the machines must win, but there is still a long way to go before a human on his or her best day is unable to defeat the best computer. — Garry Kasparov

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

I object to being called a chess genius, because I consider myself to be an all around genius, who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he is like an idiot savant, outside of chess he knows nothing. — Bobby Fischer

Chess strength in general and chess strength in a specific match are by no means one and the same thing. — Garry Kasparov

I feel that my chess strengths are still here, .. I believe I can still improve. — Garry Kasparov

I see my own style as being a symbiosis of the styles of Alekhine, Tal and Fischer. — Garry Kasparov

The Nanjing games are homework by Garry Kasparov and me, [ ... ] Today's game was provided by Garry. — Magnus Carlsen

I just think we should look at this as a chess match," he said, "between the world's greatest chess player and Garry Kasparov. — Lou Gerstner

I also follow chess on the Internet, where Kasparov's site is very interesting. — Boris Spassky

When your house is on fire, you cant be bothered with the neighbors. Or, as we say in Chess, if your King is under attack you don't worry about losing a Pawn on the Queen's side — Garry Kasparov

Ironically, the main task of chess software companies today is to find ways to make the program weaker, not stronger, and to provide enough options that any user can pick from different levels and the machine will try to make enough mistakes to give him a chance. — Garry Kasparov

Tactics involve calculations that can tax the human brain, but when you boil them down, they are actually the simplest part of chess and are almost trivial compared to strategy. — Garry Kasparov

Results show that just one year of chess tuition will improve a student's learning abilities, concentration, application, sense of logic, self-discipline, respect, behavior and the ability to take responsibility for his/her own actions. — Garry Kasparov

While reading Kasparov's book How Life Imitates Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on "popular highlights" to see what passages other readers had found interesting - and wound up becoming fascinated by a section on chess strategy I'd only lightly skimmed myself. — Clive Thompson

Chess is a unique battlefield for human minds and computers - human intuition, our creativity, fantasy, our logic, versus the brute force of calculation and a very small portion of accumulated knowledge infused by other human beings. So in chess we can compare these two incompatible things and probably make projections into our future. Is there danger that the human mind will be overshadowed by the power of computers, or we can still survive? — Garry Kasparov

The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent. — Garry Kasparov

When you consider that only an estimated 15 percent of the US population plays chess, its cultural prominence is extraordinary. It — Garry Kasparov

You cannot say, 'Go! Go! Rah! Rah! Good move!' People want some emotion. Chess is an art and not a spectator sport. — Garry Kasparov

It's true that in chess as in politics, fund-raising and glad-handing matter. — Garry Kasparov

Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be. — Garry Kasparov

Look at the catastrophic record Vishy Anand has against Garry Kasparov. Kasparov managed to beat him almost everywhere they played, even though Vishy Anand has belonged to the absolute top players in the world for fifteen years. This difference cannot be explained purely in chess terms, there must have been some psychology. — Vladimir Kramnik

Look at Garry Kasparov. After he loses, invariably he wins the next game. He just kills the next guy. That's something that we have to learn to be able to do — Maurice Ashley

When Garri Kasparov wrestles with his conscience, he always wins. It's what he's best at. — Dominic Lawson

Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today. However, our looked-down-upon cousin, checkers, or draughts, suffered this fate quite recently thanks to the work of Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta and his unbeatable program Chinook. — Garry Kasparov

Chess is one of the few arts where composition takes place simultaneously with performance — Garry Kasparov

A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician. — Garry Kasparov

The highest Art of the Chess player lies in not allowing your Opponent to show you what he can do. — Garry Kasparov

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life. — Garry Kasparov

I used to play a lot of chess and competitive chess and study chess and as you get to the grandmasters and learn their styles when you start copying their games like the way they express themselves through ... The way Kasparov or Bobby Fischer expresses themselves through a game of chess is it's astonishing. You can show a chess master one of their games and they'll say "Yeah, that is done by that player." — Rainn Wilson

I dropped the King's Indian in 1997 after one too many bad experiences against Kramnik. — Garry Kasparov

I may play some exhibition games so I don't want to quit the game of chess completely. I just decided and it's a firm decision not to play competitive chess anymore. — Garry Kasparov

I started playing chess when I was five years old. I learned the moves from my mother, then worked with my father - and later trainers. My style became very technical. I sacrificed a lot of things. I was always hunting for the king, for the mate. I'd forget about my other pieces. — Garry Kasparov

With this mistake I deprived myself of the possibility to make a contribution to the treasury of chess art. — Garry Kasparov

Chess is not dominoes — Garry Kasparov

Weaknesses of character are normally shown in a game of chess. — Garry Kasparov

Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi have absolutely destroyed chess by their immoral, unethical, prearranged games. These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they're going to know the truth when I do this book! — Bobby Fischer

One of the things that first attracted me to chess is that it brings you into contact with intelligent, civilized people - men of the stature of Garry Kasparov, the former world champion, who was my part-time coach. — Magnus Carlsen

In chess, bigamy is acceptable but monarchy is absolute. — Garry Kasparov

Kortchnoi's heritage is many-faceted - over the decades he has several times corrected and changed his style. But the main thing has invariably remained his search for chess truth. — Garry Kasparov

In conclusion, if you want to unravel the multitude of secrets of chess then don't begrudge the time. — Garry Kasparov

A championship contender in the early twentieth century needed charisma and a knack for cultivating sponsorship, and Rubinstein was the epitome of the shy and unsocial chess player. Now matter how great his chess skills, he lacked the people skills to be a self-promoter and fund-raiser. — Garry Kasparov

Caissa, the goddess of chess, had punished me for my conservative play, for betraying my nature. — Garry Kasparov

Nervous energy is the ammunition we take into any mental battle. If you don't have enough of it, your concentration will fade. If you have a surplus, the results will explode. — Garry Kasparov

Perfectly correct chess exists only in theory. — Garry Kasparov

By strictly observing Botvinnik's rule regarding the thorough analysis of one's own games, with the years I have come to realize that this provides the foundation for the continuous development of chess mastery. — Garry Kasparov

When the Soviet sports authorities attacked me for wanting to retain my chess winnings, they condemned not only my disobedience, but my lack of socialist solidarity. For me to say that my neighbors in Baku should see my keeping the Mercedes I won in Germany as normal, healthy thinking was radical and subversive. — Garry Kasparov

Tarrasch's 'dogmas' are not eternal truisms, but merely instructional material presented in an accessible and witty form, those necessary rudiments from which one can begin to grasp the secrets of chess ... — Garry Kasparov

Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters. — Garry Kasparov

Chess helps you to concentrate, improve your logic. It teaches you to play by the rules and take responsibility for your actions, how to problem solve in an uncertain environment. — Garry Kasparov

In general there is something puzzling about the fact that the most renowned figures in chess - Morphy, Pillsbury, Capablanca and Fischer - were born in America. — Garry Kasparov

I am lucky, .. that the popular sport in the Soviet Union was chess and not baseball. — Garry Kasparov

I organize a chess festival in Hungary. I support chess in schools, and I have my own chess foundation. And I started writing books. — Garry Kasparov

Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience. — Garry Kasparov

Chess was natural for me; I was extremely successful. — Garry Kasparov

The best chess masters of every epoch have been closely linked with the values of the society in which they lived and worked. All the changes of a cultural, political, and psychological background are reflected in the style and ideas of their play. — Garry Kasparov

The Kremlin is constantly changing the rules of the game to suit its purposes. We are not playing chess, we're playing roulette. — Garry Kasparov

After that, Kasparov stepped back from chess which is, and I want this to be clear, not good for chess in general at all. As a whole, the current situation in the chess world leaves a lot to be desired. — Anatoly Karpov

The public must come to see that chess is a violent sport. Chess is mental torture. — Garry Kasparov

It's quite difficult for me to imagine my life without chess. — Garry Kasparov

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

The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed. — Garry Kasparov