Garry kasparov quotes

This obligation to move can be a burden to a player without strategic vision.

[Vladimir] Putin wants to keep [Bashar] Assad in power and expand his own military base in Syria, whatever the cost. I even believe he has an interest in more and more people fleeing the country. The flow of refugees improves his negotiating position toward the West, including the German chancellor.

I would say, you have a unique chance of learning more about the game of chess with your computer than Bobby Fischer, or even myself, could manage throughout our entire lives. What is very important is that you will use this power productively and you will not be hijacked by the computer screen. Always keep your personality intact.

All women are inferior to men.

The Soviet Union tried to sell a set of ideas, very left wing, and focus on so-called peace. Vladimir Putin doesn't care who helps him to push his agenda. He is equally comfortable with the politics of Nigel Farage and Corbyn in Britain, Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. Whether far left or nationalist, he doesn't care, as long as they support chaos and destruction and the undermining of existing institutions.

The highest Art of the Chess player lies in not allowing your Opponent to show you what he can do.

Vladimir Putin likes Donald Trump because he supports this view of the world, that the big guys can carve it up, sit and talk about the world, carve up the countries, shape borders. For Putin, treaties, alliances, Nato, the EU are stumbling blocks.

Boris Vasilievich was the only top-class player of his generation who played gambits regularly and without fear ... Over a period of 30 years he did not lose a single game with the King's Gambit, and among those defeated were numerous strong players of all generations, from Averbakh, Bronstein and Fischer, to Seirawan.

Putin can't afford to leave the office because he will be in real danger of being prosecuted for things he and his people did during their stay in power.

Inevitably the machines must win, but there is still a long way to go before a human on his or her best day is unable to defeat the best computer.

Nowadays games immediately appear on the Internet and thus the life of novelties is measured in hours. Modern professionals do not have the right to be forgetful - it is 'life threatening'.

The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed.

The regime is in trouble economically and can no longer offer anything to its citizens. That's why [Vladimir] Putin has to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, so he can serve his people the fairy tale of Russian pride and regaining its strength as a major power.

Solving new problems is what keeps us moving forward as individuals and as a society, so don't back down.

Rosneft, for instance, was mainly built upon capital stolen from [jailed oligarch Mikhail] Khodorkovsky's company, but the IPO was successful with many Western corporations investing in it. This means that it is extremely difficult to detect these assets in their pure form.

Chess is mental torture.

It's quite difficult for me to imagine my life without chess.

Next to the intellectual stimulation of chess, the educational value is of great importance. Chess teaches logic, imagination, self-discipline, and determination.

The Far East and Eastern Siberia are already developing according to a Chinese scenario, the full scope of which will be revealed in the near future. In the next 10 to 15 years, a lot of Russian territories will become at least de facto Chinese. This will change the situation in Russia fundamentally.

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.

By strictly observing Botvinnik's rule regarding the thorough analysis of one's own games, with the years I have come to realize that this provides the foundation for the continuous development of chess mastery.

The stock market and the gridiron and the battlefield aren't as tidy as the chessboard, but in all of them, a single, simple rule holds true: make good decisions and you'll succeed; make bad ones and you'll fail.

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.

If we look at statistical data, we see that Protestant countries in terms of economic development are more successful than those observing Catholicism.

More and more people in my country recognise the dangers of having their governors appointed by Putin and having no influence in parliament because Parliament today is also following instructions from Kremlin and no longer represents its people.

When your house is on fire, you cant be bothered with the neighbors. Or, as we say in Chess, if your King is under attack you don't worry about losing a Pawn on the Queen's side

Many politicians in the West cling to the notion of a partnership with Russia. They want to include [Vladimir] Putin, make compromises and constantly negotiate new deals with him. But history has taught us that the longer we pursue appeasement and do nothing, the higher the price will be later on. Dictators don't ask "Why?" before they seize even more power. They ask: "Why not?"

Chess helps you to concentrate, improve your logic. It teaches you to play by the rules and take responsibility for your actions, how to problem solve in an uncertain environment.

Chess is one of the few arts where composition takes place simultaneously with performance

I say we should praise Donald Trump for existing and for winning, because it has woken people up. For many years, I have been trying to say to Europeans, and especially to Americans, that Vladimir Putin is a problem for the world. And they have swatted me away. "It's your problem, we have our democracy." Suddenly, because of Trump, they are learning about separation of powers, independence of the judiciary and that Ronald Reagan was right when he said, «Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction».

Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.

Nowadays, a 13-year-old would probably know more than Bobby Fischer knew when he retired. They analyse all the moves and prepare themselves on their computers. But that doesn’t mean they are special.

With each success the ability to change is reduced. My longtime friend and coach Grandmaster Yuri Dokhoian, aptly compared it to being dipped in bronze. Each victory added another coat.

By this measure (on the gap between Fischer & his contemporaries), I consider him the greatest world champion

Attackers may sometimes regret bad moves, but it is much worse to forever regret an opportunity you allowed to pass you by.

A machine helps us to annihilate our weaknesses. We don't have a steady hand. We can lose all vigilance. We can be distracted by something that is not that relevant. But we have intuition. We can feel certain things. And with a machine you can check whether it's right or wrong. That's why by bringing the two together, you create a very, very powerful combination.

Nervous energy is the ammunition we take into any mental battle. If you don't have enough of it, your concentration will fade. If you have a surplus, the results will explode.

I try to play, always, beautiful games...always I wanted to create masterpieces.

A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians.

A game of chess holds many secrets. Fortunately! That is why we cannot clearly state whether chess is science, art, or a sport.

The West can't come up with anything to deal with Moscow, except appeasement.

The best chess masters of every epoch have been closely linked with the values of the society in which they lived and worked. All the changes of a cultural, political, and psychological background are reflected in the style and ideas of their play.

Learning from our mistakes is critical for improving, but even I don't have patience for ranking my regrets. Regret is a negative emotion that inhibits the optimism required to take on new challenges. You risk living in an alternative universe, where if only you had done this or that differently, things would be better. That's a poor substitute for making your actual life better, or improving the lives of others. Regret briefly, analyze and understand, and then move on, improving the only life you have.

Young people, especially young men due to culture and perhaps testosterone, dream about changing the world, making an impact, doing big things. Now our young people are told life was better in the past, that we should be less ambitious and hold on to what we have. The grand narratives of exploration and change that drove the world forward for a century have been tamed.

It's interesting that the greatest minds of computer science, the founding fathers, like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, they all looked at chess as the ultimate test. So they thought, "Oh, if a machine can play chess, and beat strong players, set aside a world champion, that would be the sign of a dawn of the AI era." With all due respect, they were wrong.

If you wish to succeed, you must brave the risk of failure.

Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician who has led anti-corruption protests, had a blog about a credit line to a company owned by Vladimir Putin's son-in-law, $1.75 billion from Russian state funds; this is one transaction. Putin controls more money directly and indirectly than any individual in human history.

We think about time as something not to waste, not as something to invest.

There is no democracy in Russia. Dictators do not go away through the vote. Putin relies on riot police, thousands of them, with heavy equipment, fighting Russian youngsters from opposition.

...comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I've often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

One does not succeed by sticking to convention.

This traditionally happens in Russia and in every other undemocratic country as well - the quest for a scapegoat won't be long, either. The easiest way to find a scapegoat is to ascribe that role to former governments.

In chess the rules are fixed and the outcome is unpredictable, whereas in Putin's Russia the rules are unpredictable and the outcome is fixed.

There is a good chance Donald Trump won't survive four years. Conflict of interest is the biggest danger for Trump. He is destroying one of the pillars of the free world. He is seeking to eliminate the very concept of conflict of interest. A lot of things in America were built on a code of honour. I am confident the damage done by ruling through family and friends will be made impossible by future regulation.

I like to say that the attacker always has the advantage.

Losing can persuade you to change what doesn't need to be changed, and winning can convince you everything is fine even if you are on the brink of disaster.

When you put party over principles, you can't avoid tripping over your own hypocrisy and contradictions eventually. The GOP establishment refused to stand up to Trump during the primary because they wanted his voters in order to beat Hillary Clinton. Then he won the primary, and then the general, and the GOP both times decided it was better to cling to their grasp at power, to cling to Trump and all he stands for, a decision that should destroy the party or drag it down for a generation.

Right, left, Greens, Baathists, whatever: it comes down to grabbing and holding power and using ideology - or religion, race - as a justification.

[Vladimir] Putin is more of a poker player. In poker, unlike chess, you can effectively compensate for a very weak hand by bluffing. There are fixed rules in chess, and no one knows how the game will end. Things are currently the other way around in Putin's realm. But it won't stay that way forever.

Caissa, the goddess of chess, had punished me for my conservative play, for betraying my nature.

Boris Nemtsov and I began to argue after Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. In my opinion, there was no longer a realistic chance to achieve regime change through peaceful political means, or real elections. Boris, on the other hand, never lost this hope. He felt that my assessment was premature and said: "You have to live a long time to see changes in Russia." He was deprived of that opportunity.

Enormous self-belief, intuition, the ability to take a risk at a critical moment and go in for a very dangerous play with counter-chances for the opponent - it is precisely these qualities that distinguish great players.

The worst enemy of the strategist is the clock. Time trouble... Reduces us all to pure reflex and reaction, tactical play. Emotion and instinct cloud our strategic vision when there is no time for proper evaluation.

Chess strength in general and chess strength in a specific match are by no means one and the same thing.

Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.

In conclusion, if you want to unravel the multitude of secrets of chess then don't begrudge the time.

Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you're going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles.

In chess, bigamy is acceptable but monarchy is absolute.

When I was preparing for one term's work in the Botvinnik school I had to spend a lot of time on king and pawn endings. So when I came to a tricky position in my own games I knew the winning method.

There is no one that can share your responsibility. It it is your responsibility you must carry it on and you must be responsible for your actions. At the end of the day we all are being challenged, sooner or later, by our destiny. And it's up to us to make all the difference in this life. If not you, who else?

If critics and competitors can't match your results, they will often denigrate the way you achieve them. Fast, intuitive types are called lazy. Dedicated burners of the midnight oil are called obsessed. And while it's obviously not a bad idea to hear and consider the opinions of others, you should be suspicious when these criticisms emerge right on the heels of success.

Many Republicans who traditionally were for a positive role in the world, anti-Russian, now they want to defend their party and leader, and they don't care about real arguments. The paradox is the Democrats were so timid in criticising Vladimir Putin. Barack Obama appeased him and now they are criticising Putin's interference in American democracy. It is a strange reversal of the roles.

If you're already in a fight, you want the first blow to be the last and you had better be the one to throw it.

The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent.

Ultimately, what separates a winner from a loser at the grandmaster level is the willingness to do the unthinkable. A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough. Given the opportunity, I must have the guts to explode the game, to upend my opponent's thinking and, in so doing, unnerve him. So it is in business: One does not succeed by sticking to convention. When your opponent can easily anticipate every move you make, your strategy deteriorates and becomes commoditized.

Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time.

We are living in a world where major states and large geopolitical projects have to prove their competitive edge. It is clear, as well, that with regard to the intensifying American-Chinese confrontation and the inert power of a united Europe, Russia has to make up its mind - because it is losing ground as an independent center of power.

This is the essential element that cannot be measured by any analysis or device, and I believe it's at the heart of success in all things: the power of intuition and the ability to harness and use it like a master.

The Russian Dept of Tourism has declared Ukraine its most dangerous destination. Many Russian tourists have disappeared there.

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.

Winning is not a secret that belongs to a very few, winning is something that we can learn by studying ourselves, studying the environment and making ourselves ready for any challenge that is in front of us.

It is better to have a bad plan than no plan.

Barack Obama took over after Vladimir Putin's first aggression, in Georgia. In 2009, he did the reset policy because they had these stupid ideas about former president Dmitry Medvedev. They thought he would be the leader, not Putin. Everyone played this game with Medvedev as their bet, Berlin, Paris, London, the idea of smoothly transferring to something more acceptable. It was always a charade, a Putin project to solidify his power and come back after four years of nominal occupation of the office by Medvedev.

I’ve seen - both in myself and my competitors - how satisfaction can lead to a lack of vigilance, then to mistakes and missed opportunities.

A master looks at every move he would like to make, especially the impossible ones

The only way to fail for me is just not to try.

You can't overestimate the importance of psychology in chess, and as much as some players try to downplay it, I believe that winning requires a constant and strong psychology not just at the board but in every aspect of your life.

Results show that just one year of chess tuition will improve a student's learning abilities, concentration, application, sense of logic, self-discipline, respect, behavior and the ability to take responsibility for his/her own actions.

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.

Remember that the machine is there to help you, because at the end of the day, you're not playing freestyle chess, advanced chess, human-plus-machine. If you are playing against other humans, it's about winning the game. The machine will not be assisting you, unless you are cheating of course. And since the machine is not there, you have to make sure that everything you learn from the computer will not badly affect the way you play the real game.

Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles

A championship contender in the early twentieth century needed charisma and a knack for cultivating sponsorship, and Rubinstein was the epitome of the shy and unsocial chess player. Now matter how great his chess skills, he lacked the people skills to be a self-promoter and fund-raiser.

Few things are as psychologically brutal as chess.

A very strong player can manage and can just know how to manage a thousand positions. I get it; it's a very arbitrary number. So then you have the world champion who could do more. But, again, any increase in numbers creates, sort of, a new level of playing. And then you go to the very top, and the difference is so minimal, but it does exist. So even a few players who never became world champion, like Vassily Ivanchuk, for instance, I think they belong to the same category.

The growth of violent extremism is partly a consequence of how the developed world has become complacent and defensive about its own greatness and ambition.

I wouldn't place much stock in numbers. I don't believe that they reflect Putin's true popularity. Just think about how the pollsters proceed. They call people and they ask them questions on the street. In today's Russia, it takes a lot of courage to tell a stranger something critical about the head of the Kremlin. And yet more than 20 percent do so nonetheless.

Vladimir Putin is the wealthiest man on the planet, for sure. But this is different to the wealth of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett, a Carlos Slim or a Sergey Brin. They stay wealthy whether it is Barack Obama or Donald Trump in power. Putin's wealth depends on him staying in power. It is all about controlling the budget, the hard currency reserves and keeping under his thumb the oligarchs who cannot move their money without his permission. It is something close to a trillion dollars that he can control and move.

Ultimately, what separates a Winner from a Loser at the Grandmaster level is the Willingness to do the Unthinkable.

Without a goal [maneuvering is] aimless. You might be a master tactician, but you'll have no sense of strategy.

I see my own style as being a symbiosis of the styles of Alekhine, Tal and Fischer.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do in a pressure situation is to allow the tension to persist. The temptation is to make a decision, any decision, even if it is an inferior choice.

Vladimir Putin is the bigger danger than Donald Trump because Trump can be dealt with within American democracy. There is an independent judiciary. He cannot overrule American courts. He will have to play by some rules. He will do damage certainly, but to do real damage I think he is too weak. Putin is aggressive wherever he can be. In Europe, in Germany, Putin will not stop.

If people are being left behind, impoverished economically or even culturally, they will always be easily targeted by demagogues of any stripe, exploiting their hate and fear and making impossible promises. That impoverishment is more likely if we fight a doomed battle against automation and new technology, when what those people need most is the ambitious new tech that is the only proven way to create sustainable industries and jobs.

Any experienced player knows how a change in the character of the play influences your psychological mood.

I started playing chess when I was five years old. I learned the moves from my mother, then worked with my father - and later trainers. My style became very technical. I sacrificed a lot of things. I was always hunting for the king, for the mate. I'd forget about my other pieces.

Capablanca possessed an amazing ability to quickly see into a position and intuitively grasp its main features. His style, one of the purest, most crystal-clear in the entire history of chess, astonishes one with his logic.

One does not succeed by sticking to convention. When your opponent can easily anticipate every move you make, your strategy deteriorates and becomes commoditized.

In an age when schools are facing significant budgetary restraints, there is a greater need than ever to make chess available to as many students as possible. We've assembled the very best in chess education to develop a complete chess curriculum - K through 12. We've designed a program that encourages creativity, instills self-discipline and offers hope and a feeling of accomplishment to millions of children.

Donald Trump is a catalyst. People care now in a way they didn't. The American institutions were rusting; now they are being revitalised. Trump is a lightning rod. They are getting engaged and the American liberal media that spent too much time on PC issues can focus on Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

For inspiration I look to those great players who consistently found original ways to shock their opponents. None did this better than the eighth world champion, Mikhail Tal. The "Magician of Riga" rose to become champion in 1960 at age twenty-three and became famous for his aggressive, volatile play.

But we must not forget the effort undertaken by the ruling elite in Russia to manipulate Western politicians, businessmen as well as journalists. That's why [Vladimir] Putin's "fifth column" is that powerful in the West.

A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough.

For young players, their minds are not overloaded. I am 54 with four kids and I do many other things. Even if I stopped everything else, spent months working just on chess, for a long match against most of the top players, a classical match, six hours, say, I don't stand a chance. I have a better chance in shorter matches. Rapid is 25 minutes, or blitz events where you have five minutes to make a move, or bullet games, where it is one minute. For blitz, five-minutes chess, I would be top ten, top five. But longer games, no chance.

If you don't take risks, you don't drink champagne.

So many dictators trying to blackmail the free world because they have no way to compete on ideas, innovation or creativity. The Cold War was two competing visions of the future. I was always anti-communist but it was an idea at least, an alternative idea. We do not have a competing vision for the future because the ideals of these dictators are in the past. They are time travellers. They need confrontation and destruction to survive. The problem is, many people in the free world are sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

My life is split in three parts; I don't know the percentage. One could be called "chess" - the Kasparov Chess Foundation, promoting the game, training young players, playing on the internet, sometimes exhibitions. The second area would be "writing" - books, articles, Twitter, Facebook. And then "political activity" - fighting for human rights and democracy, so TV, interviews, speeches.

By the time a player becomes a Grandmaster, almost all of his training time is dedicated to work on this first phase. The opening is the only phase that holds out the potential for true creativity and doing something entirely new.

Donald Trump envies anyone who can do things he can't.

The biggest problem I see among people who want to excel in chess – and in business and in life in general – is not trusting their instincts enough.

It is quite clear, however, that there won't be any real changes with the current clan structure having seized power in the course of the Karabakh conflict.

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.

The loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. Today I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.

Chess continues to advance over time, so the players of the future will inevitably surpass me in the quality of their play, assuming the rules and regulations allow them to play serious chess. But it will likely be a long time before anyone spends 20 consecutive years as number, one as I did.

It's not enough to be talented. It's not enough to work hard and to study late into the night. You must also become intimately aware of the methods you use to reach your decisions.

I have no idea how long Putin will last. The good news is, Putin doesn't know either. It will be sudden and it won't be peaceful. He has burned his bridges.