With this mistake I deprived myself of the possibility to make a contribution to the treasury of chess art.
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.
Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles.
Next to the intellectual stimulation of chess, the educational value is of great importance. Chess teaches logic, imagination, self-discipline, and determination.
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.
If you make a decision to fight for future of your own country you have to consider all the consequences.
I dropped the King’s Indian in 1997 after one too many bad experiences against Kramnik.
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by Putin and having no influence in parliament because Parliament today is also following instructions from Kremlin and no longer represents its people.
Thanks to the Polgars the adjective ‘men’s’ before events and the ‘affirmative action’ women’s titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms.
There can be no finer example of the inspiring powers of competition to shatter the status quo than Hungary’s Judit Polgar.
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.
I want to serve chess through games, books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world.
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.
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.
Ultimately, what separates a Winner from a Loser at the Grandmaster level is the Willingness to do the Unthinkable.
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.
Putin is like Al Capone.
I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.
I learned that fighting on the chess board could also have an impact on the political climate in the country.
It didn’t take long to recognise the shortcomings of the Soviet regime and to see the values of the free world.