Viktor Korchnoi Quotes

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.

I started by just sitting by the chessboard exploring things. I didn't even have books at first, and I just played by myself. I learnt a lot from that, and I feel that it is a big reason why I now have a good intuitive understanding of chess.

I was world champion. For me, chess is my life. It is everything.

I barely know what my plans are for tomorrow, but I hope chess will remain a major part of my life.

I study chess eight hours a day, on principle.

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

In chess, knowledge is a very transient thing. It changes so fast that even a single mouse-slip sometimes changes the evaluation.

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

I have never in my life played the French Defence, which is the dullest of all openings.

I play a lot of chess, just to a bog-average level. But I find it stimulates your mind with all the combinations of different moves.

The very idea of how chess players manipulate their game excites me.

I did take part in a couple of Vishy Anand's training camps. The experience has truly been invaluable. I saw from up close the level of preparation that I should be striving for.

Online chess is very popular and cool, don't get me wrong, but it is a different discipline.

My mother is Russian and father Nepalese, so we always had a chess board at home. Chess is part of the culture in both Russia and Nepal.

I know people who have all the will in the world, but still can't play good Chess

I am acutely conscious, from vast experience in opens, that guys around, say 2100 or more can definitely play chess and that one often has to work very hard to beat them.

Because of the level of my chess game, I was able - even against a weak opponent, such as my younger brothers or the dog - to get myself checkmated in under three minutes. I challenge any computer to do it faster.

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.

Well I just so happened to bump into a chess book in the library at school and I didn't know that there were books on chess and so I take this book out and I'm like this is going to be cool, I'm going to whoop on this guy now, so I studied the book and I go back and the guy crushes me again.

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.

Americans really don't know much about chess. But I think when I beat Spassky, that Americans will take a greater interest in chess. Americans like winners.

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.

The point system certainly governs a Grandmaster's decisions, but it can be outweighed in any given position by more important factors.

Modern Chess is too much concerned with things like Pawn structure. Forget it, Checkmate ends the game