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Post by Wookiee on May 5, 2006 14:37:28 GMT -5
"There are only two kinds of moves in the opening," Tartakower once remarked. "Moves which are wrong and moves which could be wrong."
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Post by Wookiee on May 5, 2006 14:38:56 GMT -5
"When I was a heavy smoker I would get upset when I lost a game," Anatoly Lein once recalled. "Now that I no longer smoke, I get very upset when I lose a game!"
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Post by Wookiee on May 5, 2006 16:50:47 GMT -5
Like every great chess player, Franklin K. Young was well aware of the superiority of certain opening moves. "Always deploy," Young once advised, "so that the right oblique can be readily established in case the objective plane remains open or becomes permanently located on the centre or on the King's wing, or that the crochet aligned may readily be established if the objective plane becomes permanently located otherwise than at the extremity of the strategic front."
Young later clarified the passage as follows: "The best initial move for white is 1. P-K4 [the pawn in front of the king should be moved two spaces]."
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Post by Wookiee on May 5, 2006 16:59:42 GMT -5
"I have always been a sworn enemy of draws and ruined many games by playing sharply for a win in drawn positions," The International Grandmaster Ossip Bernstein once remarked. "In one tournament the veteran master Burn, who was a good friend of mine, offered me a draw on the twelfth move. I refused, played for a win and ended up in a completely lost position. For the fun of it, I then offered Burn a draw myself. With his eyes flashing slyly at me through his glasses, he replied frowningly: 'Had you accepted my offer then, I would accept yours now,' upon which I resigned."
[It was for such incidents that Bernstein once had a quasi-legal document drawn up and endorsed by Emanuel Lasker. Its central question (answered in the affirmative) was... "Am I not a chess idiot?"]
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Post by Wookiee on May 5, 2006 17:01:19 GMT -5
Cardinal Borromeo was once censured for the inordinate time he spent playing and practicing the game of chess. "What would you do if you were busy playing and the world came to an end?" he was asked one day. "Continue playing," he simply replied.
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Post by Wookiee on May 16, 2006 13:17:47 GMT -5
"I hate anyone who beats me."
- Lisa Lane
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Post by Wookiee on May 16, 2006 13:21:37 GMT -5
"You can't play chess if you're groggy from pills."
- Karpov
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Post by Wookiee on May 16, 2006 13:22:54 GMT -5
"Creating an undesired stalemate is the height of stupidity."
- Anonymous
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Post by Wookiee on May 19, 2006 12:12:01 GMT -5
"An opening novelty is to the chess Grandmaster what a slick draw is to the gunfighter. You gotta have one or you're gonna die!"
– Yasser Seirawan
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Post by Wookiee on May 19, 2006 12:13:30 GMT -5
"Any opening is good enough, if its reputation is bad enough."
- Tartakower
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Post by Wookiee on May 19, 2006 12:55:15 GMT -5
"I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never any use to oneself."
- Oscar Wilde
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Post by Wookiee on May 19, 2006 13:03:02 GMT -5
"The sight of a pasty-faced creature in bottle-end spectacles pushing little wooden men around a board hardly qualifies as throbbing pageant."
- Stephen Fry
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Post by Wookiee on May 19, 2006 13:06:11 GMT -5
‘The fact is that chess is completely pointless...... So I would urge you all to make a daily check on the English position in this current Olympiad and celebrate with me the fact that as a nation we have found true world class in an activity that is joyously, arrogantly, unrepentantly useless, unproductive, unhealthy and wonderful."
- Stephen Fry
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Post by Wookiee on May 19, 2006 13:08:58 GMT -5
"My own theory, and I cannot emphasize its worthlessness enough, is that chess is fundamentally a theatrical affair."
"Kasparov hunches himself over the game, in a brooding, minatory and virile manner that is worth at least three extra pawns."
- Stephen Fry
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Post by Wookiee on May 19, 2006 14:04:11 GMT -5
"If you play Botvinnik, it is even alarming to see him write his move down. Slightly shortsighted, he stoops over his score sheet and devotes his entire attention to recording the move in the most beautifully clear script; one feels that an explosion would not distract him and that examined through a microscope not an irregularity would appear. When he wrote down 1... c2-c4 against me, I felt like resigning."
- Hugh Alexander
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