Chess Quotes

What is it that a master sees when he looks at the board that is so different from what other players see? An old French master said: 'I see the chessboard as one sees the street on which one walks without paying much attention to it; when one opens one's wardrobe one knows where all the things are in spite of the fact that one does not see them. The same applies to the moves one makes on the chessboard.'

The writer Arthur Koestler put it like this: 'When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosiac, a still life, but a magnetic field of forces charged with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.' I like this formulation because it does not offer a purely mechanistic explanation of the chess phenomenon. It allows genius to transform perception in the way that an art connoisseur sees a different Rembrandt in the Hermitage Museum from the one seen by the ordinary man [who] wanders in off the Leningrad streets. As Wilhelm Steinitz the first World Champion once said: 'Have you ever seen a monkey examining a watch?'.

"When you play a human being it could make a mistake, and some of your moves could scare your opponents to death. Computer is very powerful and calculates like God within its limits." - Gary Kasparov.