Chess Quotes
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When I started out playing chess as a kid I thought I should be world champion. As a kid you have no idea what that means and you only sort of picture it. It is hard to imagine that I waited all those years and it happened in a late stage of my career.
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It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move.
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I play chess about four hours a day in training camp. You have to decide what move to use, or what combination of moves. I think less when I box because the reaction time is a lot quicker, but some people call me the chess boxer because they say I think too much in the ring. I take my time and they don't see the action they want. Some boxers just go in there and just throw punches and hope to win.
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I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming - or buying software - on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.
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Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
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Nowadays the dynamic element is more important in chess - players more often sacrifice material to obtain dynamic compensation.
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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.
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Chess and me, it's hard to take them apart. It's like my alter ego.
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My very first book was a games collection of Anatoly Karpov. On the whole I was attracted by positonal play with some tactics, and already then I was aiming for universality.
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Chess is a natural cerebral high.
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[When asked how someone 6'3" had dared take up golf:] I was too tall to make the chess team in my high school, so I tried golf.
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Chess was the only thing Hermione ever lost at, something Harry and Ron thought was very good for her.
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In chess there is a world of intellectual values.
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Chess is not Mathematics, where ten is always more than one; in chess the King with a pawn can beat opponent's King with all pieces if they are placed badly.
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I believe that, not only in chess, but in life in general, people place too much stock in ratings – they pay attention to which TV shows have the highest ratings, how many friends they have on Facebook, and it’s funny. The best shows often have low ratings and it is impossible to have thousands of real friends.
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I always urge players to study composed problems and endgames.
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I remember mentioning to friends back in 1938 that the world chess champion would be beaten by a computer in 50 years time. Today we know computers are not far from this goal.
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Chess is the touchstone of intellect.
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Chess is imagination.
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Each outing is its own game. You roll on your game plan. It is a different chess match each time you go out there. I just try to be prepared.
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Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, 'Chess is life.' I would say, 'Pi is life.'
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I'd love to see pitches start very dry all over the world, which is good for batting but means there will be turn - a cricket match without spinners is like a chess match without two important pieces - a less interesting game.
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It's less about the physical training, in the end, than it is about the mental preparation: boxing is a chess game. You have to be skilled enough and have trained hard enough to know how many different ways you can counterattack in any situation, at any moment.
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Who is your opponent tonight, tonight I am playing against the Black pieces
