Chess960 - Chess for the 21st Century

“Nepomniachtchi said he came up with the novelty at the board, which Shipov called a 'methodological mistake' (especially in an opening as sharp as the Grunfeld!).”
-- Chessbase, 2011

“It feels a little silly to annotate a game in which I didn't make a single move on my own, just following my preparation all the way. [...] A pretty finale. I was obviously hoping for the beauty prize sacrificing both my rooks and all, but OK, Im [sic] afraid requirements are one makes a move of his own for that it seems. Something I could avoid doing in the last five rounds in Dresden. Silly game, this chess.”
-- Jan Gustafsson, writing for Chessbase, 2011

“19.Rxc7N. There comes the novetly! [sic] Actually, the impression I had is that both players had more or less analyzed the rest of the game.”
-- Romain Edouard, reporting for Chessbase on Bilbao, 2010

“World Championship games are expected to last four, perhaps even six hours. This one was over in little more than two. The Indian World Champion was destroyed; nay, humiliated. On Bulgarian television that night, Topalov explained that the entire game had been prepared by him and his team at home; he didn’t need to find a single original move to score a simple first game victory.”
-- Ian Rogers, reporting from Sofia, Bulgaria, 2010

“The World Chess Championship between defending champion Viswanathan Anand and his Challenger Veselin Topalov got under way with a shocker. In just about an hour Anand was in a lost position. Both players powered down a very well known Gruenfeld line. Then Anand started to think, but he must still have been in preparation. And then he blundered with 23...Kf7?? which was almost certainly as a result of trying to remember his preparation rather than studying the position. He probably mixed up lines in his own mind. After 24.Nxf6 Anand didn't put up a lot of resistance and resigned after 30 moves but there was little he could do after his blunder anyway.”
-- Chessbase, 2010

“Kariakin-Shirov saw another theoretical battle in the 6...Bc5 Spanish, which has been one of the opening tabiyas of the event. [...] The most remarkable feature of the game, and a testament to the depth of Kariakin's preparation, is that when the draw was agreed at move 39, his clock showed 1.52 remaining, some twelve minutes more than he started the game with!”
-- Steve Giddins (Chessbase)

“The Nanjing games are homework by Garry Kasparov and me, [...] Today's game was provided by Garry.”
-- Magnus Carlsen

“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.”
-- Garry Kasparov

“Finally the novelty came. These days it seems to be normal to play novelties somewhere in the ending. Apart from just being the novelty, this move is also very strong. It is most probably that Radjabov found this natural improvement over the board, as he spend more than an hour, if I am not mistaken. But it could be that he was just trying to remember his own analysis (can you imagine how much he has to remember??).”
-- Mihail Marin (Chessbase)

“If you want to compete successfully, you must know the current state of affairs: which variations are played and why some old ideas are just no good any more. In short, you need a database which is up-to-date, complete, reliable, and ready to get going at once. [...] Remember: One step ahead yesterday may mean one step behind tomorrow - you always have to keep up.”
-- Chessbase (The future of all databases)

“Titled players appeared to be trotting out game after game in which the same old hoary opening sequences, memorized out to fifteen, twenty, or even more moves, were repeated endlessly. True novelties were becoming scarcer, and sometimes these 'opening' novelties didn't appear until well into the middlegame. (A master-level friend once proudly showed me a novelty he'd discovered at move twenty-seven of a very well-trodden chess opening, and it's said that even as far back as the 1950's Mikhail Botvinnik had some openings memorised past the thirtieth move).”
-- Steve Lopez (Chessbase)

“For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again.”
-- Bobby Fischer

“The Modern Benoni is one of the sharpest openings against 1 d4. Black is ready for active counterplay, especially with his pawn majority on the queenside. [...] You are bound to win many more games than usual once you take this up in earnest.”
-- Chessbase

“I can answer in a single phrase. But I don't think you will venture to print it.... 'Dancing on our graves!' Yes, the young 'stars' are dancing on our graves while we are still alive! They have taken our chess, appropriated our ideas. They are playing the same positions, which they have studied backwards and forwards, and all this pomp now looks rather foolish. Huge prizes, television, sponsors, publicity- and everyone is expected to believe their claims that it was, oh, so difficult to seize control of the c-file... As if they were seizing it with their bare hands or taking a bulldozer and dragging it with their hands to the c-file!
[...]
Thank you very much! At the bottom people will be playing the same chess- the millions will go to those at the top. Look at what's happening now. They at the top of their Mt. Olympus, can refrain from playing for six months at a time, and meanwhile the other two hundred grandmasters do all the research spade-work for them. And when six months later they open their chess magazines or consult their databases, they see that the 'galley slaves' have already debugged all the new continuations and shown how they should be played. You understand? This is their free laboratory. In effect, the 'stars' sell other people's knowledge for big money. But why, in that case, should they consider themselves more important than all the others?
[...]
In their annotations, they juggle a multitude of continuations but play only one. In any opening, there now arises a definite position in which all the continuations have been evaluated. Time and again you read in such annotations that this or that is an innovation, a new move. What of it? You are 'superstars'! Can you not play without the crutches of theory? They have intimidated everyone with their 'innovations'. Or take their standard comment somewhere on the 22nd move: 'The usual continuation here is...' In my day, there were no such comments. It simply never occurred to us to analyse an opening to the 20th move. That's a problem for a computer, not a human being.”
-- David Bronstein

“In chess so much depends on opening theory, so the champions before the last century did not know nearly as much as I do and other players do about opening theory. So if you just brought them back from the dead they wouldn’t do well. They'd get bad openings. You cannot compare the playing strength, you can only talk about natural ability. Memorisation is enormously powerful. Some kid of fourteen today, or even younger, could get an opening advantage against Capablanca, and especially against the players of the previous century, like Morphy and Steinitz. Maybe they would still be able to outplay the young kid of today. Or maybe not, because nowadays when you get the opening advantage not only do you get the opening advantage, you know how to play, they have so many examples of what to do from this position. It is really deadly, and that is why I don't like chess any more.

Morphy and Capablanca had enormous talent, Steinitz was very great too. Alekhine was great, but I am not a big fan of his. Maybe it’s just my taste. I've studied his games a lot, but I much prefer Capablanca and Morphy. Alekhine had a rather heavy style, Capablanca was much more brilliant and talented, he had a real light touch. Everybody I’ve ever spoken to who saw Capablanca play still speak of him with awe. If you showed him any position he would instantly tell you the right move. When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties – before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since.

Capablanca really was fantastic. But even he, if you study him objectively, had his weaknesses, especially when you play over his games with his notes he would make idiotic statements like 'I played the rest of the game perfectly.' But then you play through it and it is not true at all. But the thing that was so great about Capablanca was that he really spoke his mind, he said what he believed was the truth, he really said what he felt, which was wonderful. He wanted to change the rules [of chess] already, back in the twenties, because he said chess was getting played out. He was right. Now chess is completely dead. It's a joke. It's all just memorisation and prearrangement. It's a terrible game now. Very uncreative.”
-- Bobby Fischer

“I am always reminded of the case of a noted American journalist, an excellent fellow, well educated, and, at the time I have in mind, chess champion of the state in which he resided. My friend devoted a great deal of time and energy to the study of openings. Whenever I passed through his city he always came to the station for me and put me up at his house. We would have frequent conversations during which he would ask me about this or that variation; to his great surprise I would almost always answer, 'I don't know it.' Then he would say: 'What will you do when somebody plays it against you?' And I would reply, 'Ninety percent of the book variations have no great value, because they either contain mistakes or they are based on fallacious assumptions; just forget about the openings and spend all that time on the endings. In the long run you will get much better results that way.”
-- José Raúl Capablanca