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How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom

Book by Garry Kasparov · 26 quotes · Chess, Ifs, Success

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How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“To my surprise I found that when other top players in the precomputer age (before 1995, roughly) wrote about games in magazines and newspaper columns, they often made more mistakes in their annotations than the players had made at the board.”

“Ironically, the main task of chess software companies today is to find ways to make the program weaker, not stronger, and to provide enough options that any user can pick from different levels and the machine will try to make enough mistakes to give him a chance.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”