Chess Principles Quotes

You can only get good at Chess if you love the game

Combination is a soul of chess.

I didn't know so well chess theory, the theory of chess openings. And so, of course I knew the theory, but not on the level of the best players, so this was my... this was always my weakness.

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.

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.

Many persons have been confused and discouraged at the very outset of the study by the great variety and the delicate distinctions of the openings: and this has constituted a fault in many otherwise excellent manuals for the learner.

Teach people to play new chess, right away. Why do you offer them a black and white television set, when there is a set in color?

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.

I don't think I have a favorite chess move, other than checkmate, because each move is part of a combination of other moves. Just like I don't have a favorite piece, because they all work together. I mean, I love myself; I am the king on the board, but other pieces do different things and they all work together, so it's not one particular move unless it's checkmate because usually there's an answer. You know, chess is about questions and answers.

A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.

As a rule, so-called "positional" sacrifices are considered more difficult, and therefore more praise-worthy, than those which are based exclusively on an exact calculation of tactical possibilities.

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.

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.

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

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.