Martin Gardner Quotes

I've always been kind of a strategic thinking person - I love sports for instance, but my interest in sports is 'cause I love watching strategy in action or playing it. I'm not into the drama so much, of the physical action. I'm interested in the coach and how he's strategizing.

Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.

Some players are wonderful hitters of the ball, but they can't figure out ways to get out of trouble. Eighty percent of the time, there is a way. You just have to know how to look for it.

I'm someone who really thinks the game through, who has an IQ about the game, who studies the game, who knows a lot more than just running and jumping.

Gun skill is never the main reason why someone is talented at a game. It's literally their decision making.

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.

My best asset to my game is my IQ. I play the game thinking the game first.

The game is about making the right decisions.

Life is very much about making the best decisions you can. So I think chess is very valuable.

Actually, one of the fascinating things that I've learned playing chess is that the way you play chess is kind of like the way you live your life.

Kids love games and chess is a game where you have to sit down and concentrate and it just helps in every way.

Why, then, do you think the white player might have done it?" Reynie considered. He imagined himself moving out his knight only to bring it right back to where it started. Why would he ever do such a thing? At last he said,"Perhaps because he doubted himself.

It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. In the stock market you don't base your decisions on what the market is doing, but on what you think is rational. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.

A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

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.

Game theory, however, deals only with the way in which ultrasmart, all knowing people should behave in competitive situations, and has little to say to Mr. X as he confronts the morass of his problem.

The game of chess is a metaphor for life... it teaches you strategy and it teaches you the value of knowing where you are, where you want to get to and what obstacles are in the way that you need to navigate in order to get there.

A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment.

He that gives a portion of his time and talent to the investigation of mathematical truth, will come to all other questions with a decided advantage over his opponents.

All obvious moves look dubious in analysis after the game.

If you know you don't have a win, then there's no use for you being in the game.

The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions, for life is a kind of chess.

Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

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.

When you have a time of crisis what happens depends on what ideas are floating around, and what ideas have been developed, and thought through, and are made effective.