Anish Giri Quotes

Tactical and technical awareness can only improve and sharpen with time.

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

The dumber you are on court, the better you're going to play.

In any match, there are few critical moments where there's no second best decision. The rest of the moves are intuitive.

I know one of my best qualities is to read the game for my players, is to read the opponent, is to identify every detail about the opponent.

You have to think and act quickly. You have to quickly come up with a solution to beat a player, because most of the time, you are in a one-v-one.

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.

Playing me in different positions helped me to get in the head of the others players: to know what they're thinking, where and how they are going to move.

Players have to adapt nowadays, and if you have a good football brain, if you can read the game, you can manage it.

I think that football has changed, it has become more complex. For example, it's faster, you have less free space, and you have to play from such small spaces.

Football's always been cerebral. The most important thing is thinking fast.

A lot of guys are just as fast, just as strong, or just as big as me. But they're not going to be able to think the way I do on the field.

I just got to be more aggressive. A lot of time, I just got to make the right reads. It's nothing major, just minor tweaks.

I like the feeling when you don't have much time and you have to think fast.

You can be a great skater, you can have really good puck skills, but the ability to problem-solve is, to me, key.

The most important 6 inches on the battlefield is between your ears.

Decisions need to be made in milliseconds out on the field, and you need to almost know what the other guy is thinking and exactly what he's going to do.

To play chess on a truly high level requires a constant stream of exact, informed decisions, made in real time and under pressure from your opponent. What's more, it requires a synthesis of some very different virtues, all of which are necessary to good decisions: calculatioñ, creativity and a desire for results. If you ask a Grandmaster, an artist and a computer scientist what makes a good chess player, you'll get a glimpse of these different strengths in action.

If the kids get a good grasp of what the main lessons are for chess after two or three years of staying with the game, then you've given them brain food and you've given them a skill that can last them a lifetime.

Good thinkers are always in demand. A person who knows how may always have a job, but the person who knows why will always be his boss.

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.

We overload in our workouts so that the game slows down in real life. It helps you become a smarter basketball player.

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.

Boxing and chess are similar. It’s about the choice of means. Sometimes I need a pawn, a bishop or a knight to defeat my opponent. It’s about finding the best way. A good boxer has to be variable. He doesn’t just need to know how to punch. He must also know how to protect himself, how to defend, how to avoid the opponent’s punches. Only a complete fighter can become champion.

Football is like chess, only without the dice.