Here are some excerpts from a recent inteview w. Jansa during the 2005 Czech National Championship (Jansa finished 5th).

<How did you start playing competitively?> My mom went to buy me a chess set for my 10th birtday. She met a gentleman, who turned out to be IM Emil Richter. They started talk and Mr Richer invited me to the Prague club Posista. My collaboration with Emil Richter, which lasted till I was 28, dates from that point on. I regard Emil Richter not only being a great pedagogue, but also being one of the strongest chessplayers in the land. Even Pachman stated about Richter that had Richter had more oportunities, he would have been so good that nobody could have faced him.

<How did your training go?> With Richter, you did not care about opening. Instead, the understanding of the depths of chess was at the training core. Richter realy liked chess studies; he had an excellent strategic feel and judgement for positions. I too learned a love for compositions from him. Chess studies are, to my opinion, now an underappreciated tool of training and of chess in general. So often one can find there some crystaline truth about positions, strategic ideas, or strength of individual piecess. I like the studies by Kasparian, Reti, Matison, and Troitsky. It is interesting, that Lasker held Reti in a fairly low esteem as a chessplayer. But when Lasker read through Reti's compositions, he declared Reti a genius.

< How/when did you become a GM; what was your ELO, and how high you got with your competive results? > I got the GM title in 1974, when I was 32. My highest rating was 2545, which I think is equivalent of being over 2600 today. And the highest I got on the FIDE list was the 33rd place in the world. But I thing of Elo as being only an ancilary measure of player's strength ...

< If you were to put together top-10, who wouldn't be missing? > A hard question. I personaly would put Fischer at the top; he was the only player so feared, and to draw him even with White was desperately hard. He was able to find all essential at the board better that anybody else. ... In Fischer vs Hort, 1970, Hort was standing a bit better at the adjournement. We analysed the game and suddenly Hort said: "Gentlemen, I just need to see a clear draw!" With anyone else in the world, he would have tried to win that game. We found a forced repetition of moves and that is how the game ended. Disapointed by the adjournement was -- Fischer. I would rather state the rest of the list without any particular order; those are realy hard. I certainly have to include Kasparov, Karpov, Keres, Tal, Spassky, Alekhine, Capablanca, Lasker, Smyslov, Petrosian, Botvinnik.

<How about today chess?> Today chess is different. A classical example is Leko: His discipline and absoprtion of information made him into a player of world top class, even though, to my opion, he lacks chess personality. A personality is, for instance, Anand: I like his chess; it has clear strategic concepts. And Anand is capable of playing practically anything. Today chess is too affected by computer science and that is not realy endeering. On the other side, guys such as Kasparov and Kramnik are capable of, with the help of computer science, moving chess forward.

< How do you view the shattered chess world? > ... we should take a move back, I think, and return to the candidates cycles.