Vladimir Kramnik Quotes

Chess is so inspiring that I do not believe a good player is capable of having an evil thought during the game.

The most interesting thing to me in chess are not the gambits. Or the moves. It's the mental toughness.

We are studying the opponent all the time and it is maybe about chess and finding the right move at the right moment and that makes this so interesting.

Once you're a chess player, you spend a lot of time thinking about the game and you can't get it completely out of your head.

I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

I believe every chess player senses beauty, when he succeeds in creating situations, which contradict the expectations and the rules, and he succeeds in mastering this situation.

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.

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

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

For example, computer defends well, but for humans its is harder to defend than attack, particularly with the modern time control.

I love to play chess. The last time I was playing, I started to really see the board. I don't mean just seeing a few moves ahead - something else. My game started getting better. It's the patterns. The patterns are universal.

I could think six shots ahead. It's no different to playing chess.

I see myself used in terms of reading mismatches. If it's small, go inside. If it's big, come outside. And if it's in between, then work him, make him think you're going outside, go back inside. Just play chess.

I think for me the main goal that I have, or at least what I really aspire to, is to raise the level of chess.

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.

When you watch chess, you don't see the four hours that the player spends preparing for a match ahead of time.

I started chess around the age of seven. I was inspired by the game, but soon legends like Kasparov, Karpov, Fischer, Anand and many other world champions captivated me.

I learned to play chess at a young age, and I think that's where learning to plan things out and put things in position, that was the best thing for me.

If you talk to some of the older players, they definitely say they see beauty in certain games. In my case, there are certain times when I think, 'Wow, that's so amazing, chess is so full of ideas.' But most of the time I tend to be much more pragmatic about it, as opposed to thinking about it as art or something exquisite.

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

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.

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

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

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.