Quotes Garry Kasparov

Know your weaknesses and strengths  

Self-awareness is essential to being able to combine your knowledge, experience and talent to reach your peak performance. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

A key to developing successful strategies is to be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses, to know what you do well. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess

You must be aware of your limitations and also of your best qualities. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

The first phase in a chess game: The opening 

The purpose of the opening isn't just to get through it, it's to set the stage for the type of middlegame you want. This can also mean manoeuvring for the type of game your opponent doesn't want. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

By the time a player becomes a Grandmaster almost all of his training time is dedicated to work on this first phase. The openings are the only phase in which there is the possibility of unique application. You can find something that no one else has found. Although the area narrows each year there remains a great deal of unexplored territory. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

The second phase: The Middlegame 

What sort of middlegame is our opening going to lead to? Is it one we are prepared for? Is it the type…we have experience with? 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

We must also play the middlegame with an eye on the endgame. If we have sacrificed material for an attack we will almost certainly lose the endgame if the attack fails in the middlegame. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess   

Our decisions, 
The rationale behind every move 

We all make our decisions based on a combination of analysis and experience. …we have to be able to take a wider view so that we can evaluate the deeper consequences of our tactical decisions. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Mikhail Botvinnik…insisted that we must recognize the rationale behind every move. All of Botvinnik's students learned to become great sceptics, even of the moves of the best players. Most of the time we eventually discovered that there was a powerful idea behind each Grandmaster move, but we also found improvements. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

The best move 

The best move might be so obvious that it's not necessary to spend time working out the details, especially if time is of the essence. This is rare, however, and it is often when we assume something is obvious and react hastily that we make a mistake. More often we should break routine by doing more analysis, not less. These are the moments when your instincts tell you that there is something lurking below the surface, or that a critical juncture has been reached and a deeper look is required. 

In order to detect these key moments you must be sensitive to trends and patterns in your analysis. If one of the branches in your analysis starts to show surprising results, good or bad, it's worth investing the time to find out what is going on. Sometimes it's hard to explain exactly what makes those bells go off in your head telling you there is more to be found. The important thing is to listen to them when they ring. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

Missing the strongest move 

I missed the strongest move…my missing the very best move illustrates one of the perils of becoming fixated on a distant goal. I was so entranced by my vision of the gold at the end of this rainbow that I stopped looking around as I approached it. I'd managed to convince myself that such a pretty finish must be scientifically correct, too – a potentially dangerous delusion. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Daydream a little, 
Don't settle automatically for routine solutions, 
Break your routines  

…Shirov moved his rook up the board, preparing to attack my queen on the next move. It was obvious that I had to get my queen out of the way and I sat looking at the few possible retreats. All the options would leave the position dynamically balanced, but I was disappointed there wasn't the opportunity for more.  Before I resigned myself to the inevitable queen move I took a deep breath and took in the rest of the board. As with so many fantasy moves, this one started with a mental 'wouldn't it be nice if …' If you daydream a little about what you would like to see happen, sometimes you find that it is really possible. What if I ignored his threat to my queen? He would have extra material, but my pieces, while technically outgunned by his queen, would be very active and he'd be under pressure.  So instead of picking up my queen, my hand lifted my king and moved it a single square towards the centre of the board. The paradox was satisfying, ignoring all the action and threats and playing an innocuous-looking move with the weakest piece on the board. Of course I was also sure that it was a strong move on its objective merits. Fantasy must be backed up by sober evaluation and calculation or you spend your life making beautiful blunders. 

…thinking back on the game now I credit the idea with an attitude of not settling for routine solutions.  Too often we quickly discard apparently outlandish ideas and solutions, especially in areas where the known methods have been in place for a long time. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

You won't find new ways of solving problems unless you look for new ways and have the nerve to try them when you find them. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Break your routines, even to the point of changing ones you are happy with, to see if you can find new and better methods. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Being rusty, 
Time trouble, 
Without confidence 

The culprit was letting myself get into such a time crunch. I hadn't been playing often and my rustiness had led to a lack of decisiveness, a lack of faith in my calculations. I had spent precious minutes double-checking things that I should have played quickly. The best plans and the most devious tactics can still fail without confidence. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

Strategic Planning: Have long-term goals 

If you play without long-term goals your decisions will become purely reactive and you'll be playing your opponent's game, not your own. As you jump from one new thing to the next you will be pulled off course, caught up in what's right in front of you instead of what you need to achieve. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

Strategic Planning: The future of the decisions you make in the present 

The strategist starts with a goal in the distant future and works backwards to the present. A Grandmaster makes the best moves because they are based on what he wants the board to look like ten or twenty moves in the future. This doesn't require the calculation of countless twenty-move variations. He evaluates where his fortunes lie in the position and establishes objectives. Then he works out the step-by-step moves to accomplish those aims. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Too often we set a goal and head straight for it without considering all the steps that will be required to achieve it. What conditions must be true for our strategy to succeed? What sacrifices will be required? What must change and what can we do to induce or enable those changes? 

My instincts or analysis tell me that in a given position there is potential for me to attack my opponent's king. Next, instead of throwing my forces at the king, I search for objectives I must achieve in order to do this successfully, for example, to weaken the protection around the opponent's king by exchanging a key defending piece. I first must understand which strategic objectives will help me accomplish my goal of attacking the king and only then do I begin to plan exactly how to achieve them and to look at the specific moves that will lead to successful implementation. Failing to do this leads to simplistic, single-minded plans with little hope of success. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Tactics 

While strategy is abstract and based on long-term goals, tactics are concrete and based on finding the best move right now. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

If you don't immediately exploit a tactical opportunity the game will almost certainly turn against you. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Tactics involve calculations that are very hard for the human brain, but when you boil them down they are the simplest part of chess and almost trivial compared to strategy. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Tactics must be guided by strategy. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

…we need strategy to keep our tactics on course. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Intuition 

Even the most honed intuition can't entirely do without accurate calculations. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Intuition is where it all comes together – our experience, knowledge and will. …we cannot truly be said to have intuition in a field we have little practical knowledge of. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Calculation skills 

As with all skills, calculation and the imagination that guides it must be used regularly and pushed to their limits if they are to improve. Many chess players shy away from complex positions because they are unsure of their calculation skills. This becomes a destructive, self-perpetuating cycle. If we avoid concrete analysis, relying only on our instincts, those instincts will never be properly trained. It's good to follow our intuition, as long as we make sure we aren't avoiding the work that's required to know whether or not our judgement is correct. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Calculations, Analysis 

It doesn't matter how far ahead you see if you don't understand what you are looking at. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

…the most successful players – at any speed – base their calculations firmly in strategic planning. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

…the most effective analysis, and the fastest, is possible when there is a guiding strategy. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

When I contemplate my move I don't start out by immediately running down the decision tree. First I must consider all the elements in the position so that I can establish a strategy and develop intermediate objectives. I must keep all of those factors in mind when I finally begin to calculate variations so I know which results are favourable. Experience and intuition can guide this process, but a rigorous foundation of calculation i still required. 

No matter how much practice you have and how much you trust your gut instincts, analysis is essential. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

No matter how sure you are of your conclusions, you must back it up with analysis. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

Calculations, Analysis: Candidate moves, Tree of analysis (The decision tree) 

My experience guides me to select two or three candidate moves to focus on. Usually one can be discarded relatively quickly as inferior, and often another comes into consideration to take its place. Then I begin to expand the tree one move at a time, looking at the likely responses and my answering moves. 

In a complicated game this tree of analysis usually stays within a depth of four or five moves – that is, four of five moves for each player, or eight to ten total moves.  Unless there are special circumstances, such as a particularly dangerous position or a moment you evaluate to be a key one in the game, that's a safe, practical amount of calculation. 

The decision tree must be constantly pruned to be effective. Mental discipline is required to move from one variation to the next, discarding the less promising moves and following up the better ones. If you jump around too much you'll waste precious time and risk confusing yourself. You must also have a sense of when to stop. This can come either when you have reached a satisfactory conclusion – a path that is clearly the best, or essential – or when further analysis won't return enough value for the time spent. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess

Positional play: When there is nothing to do 

What exactly do you do when there is nothing to do? 

We call these phases 'positional play' because our goal is to improve our position. We must avoid creating weaknesses, find small ways to improve our pieces, and think small but never stop thinking. There is a tendency to get lazy in quiet positions, which is why positional masters like Karpov and Petrosian were so deadly. They were always alert and were happy to go long stretches without any real action on the board if it meant gaining one tiny advantage, and then another. Eventually their opponents would find themselves without any good moves at all, as if they were standing on quicksand. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess

Attack 

An attack doesn't have to be all or nothing, or lightning quick. Sustained pressure can be very effective, and creating long-term weaknesses in our opponent's position can lead to a win in the long run. One of the qualities of a great attacker is to get the maximum out of a position without overstepping and trying to achieve more than what is possible. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Attacking requires perfect timing as well as nerve. Knowing the right time to attack is as much an art as a science, and even for the best it's often guesswork. The window of opportunity is usually very small, as with most dynamic factors. No neon sign appears to say that there is a big opportunity right around the corner. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Detecting opportunities requires letting go of assumptions of all kinds. The patterns and automatic assumptions we rely on to save time can also prevent us from identifying the best opportunities. This is especially true in quiet positions, those periods of stability that seem unlikely to produce attacking chances. We must also avoid making too many assumptions about our competition. We are often reminded never to under-estimate our opponents, but over-estimating them also leads to missed opportunities. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

Counter-Attack 

In my thirties, after a decade as world champion… I had learned that a well-timed counter-attack against an over-aggressive opponent could be more effective than always trying to meet fire with fire. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Initiative 

Once you have the initiative you must exploit it and feed it constantly.  Wilhelm Steinitz reminded us that the player with the advantage is obliged to attack or his advantage will surely be lost. It is a dynamic factor that can disappear in an instant. A lead in initiative can be converted into material gains. Or it can be augmented into a stronger and stronger initiative until your opponent simply can't keep up and falls to your attack. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

Being a step ahead means we can keep our opponents off balance, shifting and moving in order to provoke weaknesses. The defender has to race around to cover the holes, but against constant pressure the job soon becomes impossible. Moving to cover one breach creates another until something cracks and the attack breaks through. In chess we have the 'principle of two weaknesses'. It's rare to be able to win a game against a strong player with only a single point of attack. Instead of becoming fixated on one spot, we must exploit our pressure to provoke more weak spots.  So a large part of using the initiative is mobility, flexibility and diversion. Building up all our armies to attack one spot can leave us as tied up as the defender. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Lead in development gives time advantage, 
Sacrificing to increase time advantage 

At a tournament in Yugoslavia in 1983…In my game against the leading Hungarian player, Lajos Portisch, I was straining to find a way to exploit my slight lead in development. I wanted to use this dynamic advantage to launch an attack on his king. The problem was, all of my pieces needed to use the same central square. If I played my knight there it would block my bishop, cutting it out of the game entirely. This led to my wondering – if the bishop wasn't participating actively at this exact moment in the game, why couldn't I exchange it for something of value in the black position, such as the pawn right in front of the black king?  Giving up a bishop for a single pawn doesn't make any sense from a material perspective, but it was a time advantage I had at the moment and it was more time I needed. The bishop would be otherwise unemployed in my planned operation and this way it could be sacrificed to further increase my dynamic advantage. I gave up the bishop, and with his king exposed Portisch had to lose more time running for cover. Eventually my activity overwhelmed his material lead. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Increasing the pieces activity level (Improving the energy of our own pieces) 

In exchange for time – say two moves – I can bring my knight over to a superior location. Or when I sacrifice a pawn my opponent has to lose a move or two to capture it, giving me time to augment my attack. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

When you are defending a position 

Sometimes the hardest thing to do in a pressure situation is allow the tension to persist. The temptation is to make a decision, any decision, even if it is an inferior choice. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Each player 

Each player has his own style, his own way of solving problems and making decisions. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

A World Champion 

You do not become a world champion without being able to play in different styles when necessary. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

When you are winning game after game 

Winning creates the illusion that everything is fine. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Success is seldom analysed as closely as failure and we are always quick to attribute our victories to superiority, rather than circumstance. When things are going well it is even more important to question. Over-confidence leads to mistakes, a feeling that anything is good enough. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Our egos want to believe that we won brilliantly against tough opposition, not that we were lucky, that our opponent missed several chances, and that things could have been very different. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

We cannot wait for disaster to strike before making changes. 'Find and fix' has to be our mantra. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess 

…Mikhail Botvinnik…deeply analysed all his games and published all his analysis so that it could be checked and criticized by the public. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Preparation 

Preparation requires the ability to self-motivate and to work long, lonely hours. Constant study can feel like a Sisyphean task when you know that perhaps only 10 per cent of your analysis will ever see the light of day. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Don't squeeze both balls 

When I played Petrosian in the Netherlands in 1981 I was eighteen and Petrosian was fifty-two. I was eager to avenge losing to him earlier in the year in Moscow, where I had developed an impressive attacking position that exploded in my face. At the time I thought it was an accident, but then it happened again. Every time it looked like my offensive was crashing through he would calmly make a little adjustment. All my pieces were swarming around his king and I was sure it was only a matter of time before I would land the decisive blow. But where was it? I started to feel like a bull chasing a toreador around the bullring. Exhausted and frustrated, I made one mistake, then another, and went on to lose the game. …Over the next two years I equalized our career score by twice beating Petrosian with a quiet positional style, almost the style of Petrosian himself. I credit my successful change of approach to advice given to me by the man who took the world title from Petrosian in 1969, Boris Spassky. Before I played Petrosian again, less than a year after the defeats…I spoke with Spassky… He counselled me that the key was to apply pressure, but just a little, steadily. 'Squeeze his balls,' Spassky told me unforgettably, 'but just squeeze one, not both!' 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Paul Morphy (1837–84) 

Instead of flying directly into an attack, as was the rule in those days, Morphy first made sure everything was ready. He understood that a winning attack should only be launched from a strong position and that a position with no weaknesses could not be overwhelmed. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Mikhail Botvinnik (1911–1995) 

A significant part of Mikhail Botvinnik's intensive research of his opponents was dedicated to discovering such biases in their play. He would comb through their games looking for errors and try to categorize those errors in a way he might be able to exploit.  In his teachings he made it clear to us that the worst type of mistake was a mistake that made you predictable. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Mikhail Tal (1936–1992) 

He had a unique gift for knowing just how far he could go, how much material he could give up. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Rapid Chess 

In 1987 I played a six-game match of 'rapid chess'…against…Nigel Short… In these rapid games we had just twenty-five minutes each to make all our moves… I trained…with this…time limit and discovered that it was still possible to play deep concepts despite the impossibility of calculating deeply on each move. Instead of a profound study of a position we must rely more on instinct. It would be fair to assume that in rapid chess careful planning and strategic goals are secondary, or even ignored, in favour of quick calculation and intuition. …But the most successful players – at any speed – base their calculations firmly in strategic planning. Far from being mutually exclusive, the most effective analysis, and the fastest, is possible when there is a guiding strategy. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

Talent 

Everyone, at any age, has talents that aren't fully developed. Even those who reach the top of their professions aren't immune. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

If we're going to get the most out of the talent we're born with we have to be prepared to analyse ourselves critically and improve our weakest points. The easiest thing is to rely on talent and focus only on what we do well. It's true that you want to play to your strengths, but if there is too much of an imbalance growth is limited. The fastest way to improve overall is to work on your weak spots. 
It's important not to listen to the stereotypes we have of ourselves when embarking on this project. Our own opinions of our abilities are often wildly inaccurate, driven by one or two incidents or comparisons. People who constantly tell others, and themselves, that they are forgetful or indecisive create a negative reinforcement loop that becomes hard to break. How do you know your memory is any worse than your spouse's, or mine? It's much better to be a little over-confident than the opposite. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

…it is clear to me that I would not have achieved such success at anything other than chess. The game came to me naturally, its requirements fitting my talents like a glove. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess  

…as we get older we rarely test our resources and without such testing it is impossible to discover our gifts. If opportunity wasn't provided at a young age, it can be created in adulthood. We can look for ways to experiment and to push the boundaries of our capacity in different areas. 
– Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess