for reference...

Eugene Znosko-Borovsky in "The Art of Chess Combination" wrote :

Some players believe that a combination is a spontaneous creation, that the possibility of a sacrifice springs up in the mind like a flash of genius, as surprising to the player as to his opponent. The truth is that combinations due to pure chance are not merely fantastic. There are combinations based on the opponent's errors; and most "traps" may be classed among these. There is even the type of player, the coffee-house expert, who speculates on the ignorance and inexperience of his adversaries. But this is detestable and inglorious style of play, based on others; weaknesses, no one one's own strength. True combination is quite another matter. The crown of a fine player's logical chess, it must be prepared, and not left to chance.

Fred Wilson explains in "303 Tricky Chess Tactics" :

A combination is a tactical maneuver in which you sacrifice material to obtain an advantage, or at least to improve your position. So, strategy then, is your general plan, while tactics are your specific means of carrying it out.

In "The Game of Chess" by Siegbert Tarrasch we are told :

Tactics are the most important element of the Middle Game. We must above all "see" what is more or less hidden. We must exploit opportunities for combinations wherever they are offered. Here there is only an illusory guard, there our opponent has a man quite unguarded, or a double attack, etc., is possible. Over and over again there occur the tactical maneuvers ... and these opportunities must frequently be created by a sacrifice. Mistakes by our opponent must be recognized as such, and also those that we ourselves are about to make.

Irving Chernev quoted Emanuel Lasker in "The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played":

In the beginning of the game ignore the search for combinations, abstain from violent moves, aim for small advantages, accumulate them, and only after having attained these ends search for the combination - and then with all the power of will and intellect, because then the combination must exist, however deeply hidden.

Al Horowitz gave his own uniquely expressed thoughts on combinations in "Chess for Beginners":

The word "combination" can be taken to have two meanings. We think of a combination as being a series of moves, at least one of which is a sacrifice, to reach a certain goal. The word "combination" also conveys that the pieces are acting in concert, each participating piece contributing some necessary element to the plan. The "sacrifice" is the surprise "gimmick" which.... gives away some material in astonishing fashion in order to gain something of even greater value later on. The astonishment we feel lends a very pleasant quality to the process; but the success of the scheme gives us a lordly feeling of successful achievement. Of course, when a clever scheme is upset by an even more ingenious rejoinder, our delight is often met with chagrin.

"Chess not only teaches us to analyze the present situation, but it also enables us to think about the possibilities and consequences. This is the art of forward-thinking." ― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

"Chess is all about maintaining coherent strategies. It's about not giving up when the enemy destroys one plan but to immediately come up with the next. A game isn't won and lost at the point when the king is finally cornered. The game's sealed when a player gives up having any strategy at all. When his soldiers are all scattered, they have no common cause, and they move one piece at a time, that's when you've lost." ― Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills

"On the chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite." ― Emanuel Lasker

"Fighting was chess, anticipating the move of one's opponent and countering it before one got hit." ― Holly Black, The Wicked King

"Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be." ― Garry Kasparov

"The most helpful thing I learnt from chess is to make good decisions on incomplete data in a limited amount of time." ― Magnus Carlsen

"I am not the piece, I am not of the piece, I am not in the piece. I am the move" ― Niranjan Navalgund

"Gameplay is all our life. Either we guard, attack or develop pieces." ― Vineet Raj Kapoor, UNCHESS: Untie Your Shoes and Walk on the Chessboard of Life

"Remember that in chess, it's only the square you land on that matters." ― Bill Robertie, Beginning Chess Play

"The pieces are connected to each other and the King and they are in this dynamic rhythm amongst themselves and with the opponent's pieces, wherein lies their purpose. Each move is an attempt to change that balance and to establish a new, more favorable balance and that is why in chess (and in life) we are most vulnerable when we are most aggressive—the aggressive move essentially causes us to lose balance." ― Roumen Bezergianov, Character Education with Chess

"To free your game, take off some of your adversary's men, if possible for nothing." ― Captain Bertin, The Noble Game of Chess (1735)

"Chess enjoys a not wholly undeserved reputation for psychic derangement. It is an endeavor associated, when not with frank madness, with oddness and isolation. I remember a psychiatrist friend visiting me at a chess club in downtown Boston once. He walked in, sat down, looked around and said, ‘Jeez, I could run a group here." ― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

"There is profound meaning in the game of chess. The board itself is life and death, painted as such in black and white. The pieces are those that make a life fundamentally healthy. The pawns are attributes we gather with nourishment and significance. The knight is our ability to be mobile and travel in whatever form it takes. The rook or castle is a place we can call home and protect ourselves from the elements. The bishop is that of our community and our belonging. The king is our mortal body; without it, we can no longer play the game. The queen is the spirit of the body - what drives our imagination, urges, a life force. A captured queen removes energy from the game, and the player may become complacent. A crowning reminder of the game is that the spirit can be possessed again through our attributes." ― Lorin Morgan-Richards

"I thought you wanted me to teach you how to play (chess).

Each possible move represents a different game - a different universe in which you make a better move.

By the second move there are 72,084 possible games.

By the 3rd - 9 million. By the 4th….

There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe. No one could possibly predict them all, even you. Which means that first move can be terrifying. It's the furthest point from the end of the game.

There's a virtually infinite sea of possibilities between you and the other side but it also means that if you make a mistake, there's a nearly infinite amount of ways to fix it so you should simply relax and play." ― Person of Interest s04e11

"At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. ... In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living. (p.195)" ― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

"Truth derives its strength not so much from itself as from the brilliant contrast it makes with what is only apparently true. This applies especially to chess, where it is often found that the profoundest moves do not much startle the imagination." ― Emanuel Lasker, Common Sense in Chess

"In life, as in chess, learning must be constant - both new things and fresh ways of learning them. The process will invariably involve a certain degree of unlearning, and possessing the readiness to that is utterly important. If your way of doing things isn't working, clinging to your conclusions is only going to hold you back. You have to get to the root of a snag in order to make a breakthrough, because it's possible that what you thought you knew isn't actually the way it is. Unlearning is perhaps the hardest thing to do, but it is a necessity if growth and success are your goals." ― Vishwanathan Anand

The US nickname Uncle Sam was derived from Uncle Sam Wilson, a meat inspector in Troy, New York.

"Life is like a game where pawns can become queens, but not everyone knows how to play. Some people stay pawn their whole lives because they never learned to make the right moves." ― Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors

"I always plan for longterm, life to me is a never ending chess match" ― James D. Wilson

"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game." ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"It's an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it; I can dominate it. And it's predictable. So, if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame." ― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit

"It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to." ― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

"She had heard of the genetic code that could shape an eye or hand from passing proteins. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It contained the entire set of instructions for constructing a respiratory system and a digestive one, as well as the grip of an infant's hand. Chess was like that. The geometry of a position could be read and reread and not exhausted of possibility. You saw deeply into the layer of it, but there was another layer beyond that, and another, and another." ― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit

"If one reads attentively, Wittgenstein writes as much in one of the rare pas- sages in which he makes use (in English) of the term "to constitute" with respect to the rules of chess: What idea do we have of the king of chess, and what is its relation to the rules of chess? . . . Do these rules follow from the idea? No, the rules are not something contained in the idea and got by analyzing it. They constitute it. . . . The rules constitute the "freedom" of the pieces. (Wittgenstein 5, p. 86) Rules are not separable into something like an idea or a concept of the king (the king is the piece that is moved according to this or that rule): they are immanent to the movements of the king; they express the autoconstitution process of their game. In the autoconstitution of a form of life what is in question is its freedom." ― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

"What I wanted to tell you about Philidor was that Diderot wrote him a letter. You know Diderot?" "The French Revolution?"
"Yeah. Philidor was doing blindfold exhibitions and burning out his brain, or whatever it was they thought you did in the eighteenth century. Diderot wrote him: 'It is foolish to run the risk of going mad for vanity's sake.' I think of that sometimes when I'm analyzing my ass over a chessboard." ― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit

"I prefer to make my annotations 'hot on the heels', as it were, when the fortunes of battle, the worries, hopes and disappointments are still sufficiently fresh in my mind. Much as I would like to, I cannot say this about these few games which will be given below. In fact, if the annotator should begin to use phrases of the type: 'in reply to...I had worked out the following variation...', the reader will rightly say 'Grandmaster, you are showing off', since the 'oldest' of these games is now more than 25 years old, and even the 'newest' more than 20. Therefore, I would ask you not to regard the following 'stylised' annotations too severely. " ― Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal

"In general, the side with less space tries to exchange pieces to release some of the pressure that the opponent's pieces exert on him." ― IM Asaf Givon

* 99 Luft Balloons: Game Collection: 99 Schönheitspreise (Steinkohl)

* Colorado Gambit: https://chessmood.com/blog/complete...

* 200 Modern Brilliancies: Game Collection: 0

* 2000#: Game Collection: Checkmate 2000

* Informant 22: Game Collection: Chess Informant 22

* 2002#: Game Collection: Checkmate 2002

* Short History: https://chessmart.com/pages/history...

* Informant 21: Game Collection: Chess Informant 21

* 2001#: Game Collection: Checkmate 2001

* Chess Terms: https://chessmart.com/pages/chess-t...

* Informant 23: Game Collection: Chess Informant 23

* 2003#: Game Collection: Checkmate 2003

* Three of the Greatest: https://chessmart.com/pages/chess-m...

* 2004#: Game Collection: Checkmate 2004

* 2005#: Game Collection: Checkmate 2005

* What is my opponent aiming at? How many times? Always COUNT Attackers vs Defenders (exclude defenders that can be eliminated/removed, such as a strong pin, undermining the defender by capturing it first, or advancing pawn poke displacement taking flight from the fight to save itself). Can the defender be removed? Can a new attacker pile on? Of course, an undefended piece is a good target if the attacker plies a worthwhile double attack when only one of the targets can be saved per turn. A mere single threat (just one target) to the undefended piece merely gives it a choice of how to protect itself, including moving to a better square with its own threat. Double attacks are double the trouble, if not more. The relative values of the units must always be considered when threats to capture exist; if a lowly pawn defends, the opposing queen won't likely initiate the capture sequence because she's so valuable. Furthermore, an "equal" exchange of like pieces (same relative value) is not necessarily an even trade, as one of the pieces was likely more valuable to its army in a positional sense than the other. This falls under the art of exchange. Always know what happens AFTER an exchange sequence has occurred that rearranges/empties the board! The last piece to capture in an exchange sequence is NOT necessarily the last word on the matter, as the opponent may now respond to a square that was previously unprofitable before the trading.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNF...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BER...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VN...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npN...

Chess is a game of choices. Take a minute or two and quickly consider all the forcing moves: checks and cut-offs, captures, threats/aims (tactics, pile on a current target, gain of tempo), pawn promotions. If the forcing moves are not profitable, then correct your problem spot, or seek to develop/mobilize: blockade weak pawns, infiltrate weak squares, seize open lines and form batteries and/or crossfires, etc. Consider each of the pieces and move possibilities to improve their production or to do a necessary job/prevention, especially outnumbering on a square or line, advancing/permanent penetration, and watch those tricky knights changing colors! Where can they go next? Would that present a problem for me? Remember, king safety and piece activity are paramount. Pawn moves are slow and weakening; use them sparingly w/a clear purpose -- never randomly for no particular reason. Don't leave your king exposed to check. Don't leave your minor pieces (knights and bishops) sleeping on the back row. The center pawns and minor pieces do the early fighting. Do aim at your own units for their protection. Don't automatically play the first or second move that you see -- consider the best option for each of the pieces and then compare/contrast, starting with the opponent's army first, and then your own army. What will my opponent do next if I allow it? If I do this, will my piece get pinned or forked? The best plan of choice might have more than one purpose and usually generates ideas of two or three future moves as a follow up/strongest continuation. One thing leads to another, and another. This is a lot to think about, and there's plenty of strategical concepts not listed (analyze forcing moves/tactics to checkmate or gain material before general strategy to correct or improve one's position), so one must develop the habit of looking for candidate moves at a glance. Otherwise, s/he falls into time trouble on the clock spending too much time looking at all the options. Pace yourself! If it is a casual game without a clock, taking too much time to make your next move will eventually cause your opponent not to bother playing you again.

"It's a great huge game of chess that's being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn't mind being a Pawn, if only I might join—though of course I should like to be a Queen, best." — Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898)

"Tis action moves the world....in the game of chess, mind that: ye cannot leave your men to stand unmoving on the board and hope to win. A soldier must first step upon the battlefield if does mean to cross it." ― Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea

"They say that chess was born in bloodshed." ― Paolo Maurensig, La variante di Lüneburg

"No battle can be won in the study, and theory without practice is dead." ― Alexander Suvarov

"The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership." ― Colin Powell

"The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one's country" ― George S. Patton Jr.

"One more dance along the razor's edge finished. Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today." ― Robert Jordan, Lord of Chaos

"World-class chess players, in addition to being considered awesomely smart, are generally assumed to have superhuman memories, and with good reason. Champions routinely put on exhibitions in which they play lesser opponents while blindfolded; they hold the entire chessboard in their heads. Some of these exhibitions strike the rest of us as simply beyond belief. The Czech master Richard Reti once played twenty nine blindfolded games simultaneously. (Afterward he left his briefcase at the exhibition site and commented on what a poor memory he had.)" ― Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

"We do not remember days, we remember moments." ― Cesare Pavese

"I believe that, not only in chess, but in life in general, people place too much stock in ratings – they pay attention to which TV shows have the highest ratings, how many friends they have on Facebook, and it's funny. The best shows often have low ratings and it is impossible to have thousands of real friends." ― Boris Gelfand

"Many have become chess masters, no one has become the master of chess." – Siegbert Tarrasch

"Chess, it's the struggle against error." ― Johannes Zukertort

"You can only get good at chess if you love the game." ― Bobby Fischer

"Chess is an infinitely complex game, which one can play in infinitely numerous & varied ways." ― Vladimir Kramnik

"When you don't know what to do, wait for your opponent to get an idea — it's sure to be wrong!" ― Siegbert Tarrasch

"What is a weak pawn? A pawn that is exposed to attack and also difficult to defend is a weak pawn. There are several varieties: isolated, doubled, too advanced, retarded." ― Samuel Reshevsky, Art of Positional Play

"You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess,' she said, as if Nora had nothing bigger to think about. ‘And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn't over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game. And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn't. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.' Mrs. Elm"
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

"In chess a combination is a forced sequence of moves that begins with a sacrifice." ― Howcast video

"The game gives us a satisfaction that life denies us. And for the chess player, the success which crowns his work, the great dispeller of sorrows, is named 'combination'." ― Emanuel Lasker - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0H...
- https://thechessworld.com/articles/... - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show... - https://www.chess.com/article/view/... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzg...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boR...

"It is a profound mistake to imagine that the art of combination depends only on natural talent, and that it cannot be learned." ― Richard Reti

"Tactics is knowing what to do when there's something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there's nothing what to do." ― Savielly Tartakower

"A sacrifice is best refuted by accepting it." ― Wilhelm Steinitz

"Chess is all about stored pattern recognition. You are asking your brain to spot a face in the crowd that it has not seen." ― Sally Simpson

"The pin is mightier than the sword" ― Fred Reinfeld

"There are more adventures on a chessboard than on all the seas of the world." ― Pierre Mac Orlan

"He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.'
Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates." ― George Orwell, 1984

MasterCard was originally called MasterCharge.

"I remember, back in college, how many possibilities life seemed to hold. Variations. I knew, of course, that I'd only live one of my fantasy lives, but for a few years there, I had them all, all the branches, all the variations. One day I could dream of being a novelist, one day I would be a journalist covering Washington, the next - oh, I don't know, a politician, a teacher, whatever. My dream lives. Full of dream wealth and dream women. All the things I was going to do, all the places I was going to live. They were mutually exclusive, of course, but since I didn't have any of them, in a sense I had them all. Like when you sit down at a chessboard to begin a game, and you don't know what the opening will be. Maybe it will be a Sicilian, or a French, or a Ruy Lopez. They all coexist, all the variations, until you start making the moves. You always dream of winning, no matter what line you choose, but the variations are still … different." … "Once the game begins, the possibilities narrow and narrow and narrow, the other variations fade, and you're left with what you've got - a position half of your own making, and half chance, as embodied by that stranger across the board. Maybe you've got a good game, or maybe you're in trouble, but in any case there's just that one position to work from. The might-have-beens are gone." (Unsound Variations)"
― George R.R. Martin, Dreamsongs, Volume II

"Life is an exchange; you'd think a chess player would know that." ― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land

"Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it's futile to continue playing (conceptualizing)." ― Bill Gaede

"A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it." ― William Hazlitt, Table-Talk, Essays on Men and Manners

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born, is to remain always a child." ― Cicero

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush ― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, "Don Quixote"

"There is no moral outcome of a chess match or a poker game as long as skill and stealth rather than cheating have been used." ― Francis P. Karam, The Truth Engine: Cross-Examination Outside the Box

Due to earth's gravity, it is impossible for mountains to be higher than 49,000 feet (15,000 metres).

"Papi taught me every piece
has its own space.

Papi taught me every piece
moves in its own way.

Papi taught me every piece
has its own purpose.

The squares do not overlap.
& neither do the pieces.

The only time two pieces
stand in the same square

is the second before one
is being taken & replaced."
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land

"The final aim of all of us playing on the board of life is to somehow break out of this board and be free" ― Vineet Raj Kapoor, UNCHESS: Untie Your Shoes and Walk on the Chessboard of Life

Diamonds are the hardest natural substance.
Diamonds are not the hardest substance of all-time, but it is the strongest substance naturally found on Earth.

Chessgames.com will be unavailable Friday, February 17, 2023 from 11AM through 11:30AM(UTC/GMT) for maintenance. We apologize for this inconvenience.

The only letter that doesn't appear on the periodic table is J. Out of 118 chemical elements, only this letter feels left out.

A piece of cake: https://blindpigandtheacorn.com/che...

Doinysius1: I had basil on the pub's potage du jour yesterday. Soup herb!

* Riddle-free-zool: https://chessimprover.com/chess-rid...

"Chess is an infinitely complex game, which one can play in infinitely numerous & varied ways." ― Vladimir Kramnik

"If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out." ― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

A Song of Heroes
by Anonymous

Our country calls for heroes,
And who is a hero now
With no fear in his eyes,
With no shade of disguise,
With a purpose upon his brow?
The wide world calls for heroes,
And who will a hero be.
With a love for the whole
And a clear, steady soul
And a spirit brave and free?
High heaven calls for heroes,
And who is a hero there,
With a will for the best,
And a mind for the test,
And a heart that knows to dare?
But never mind the heroes,
Nor herald the hero's worth:
For our land we will die
And for God on high,
And for all the groaning earth!

"Whatever you are doing in the game of life, give it all you've got." — Norman Vincent Peale

"What you do today can improve all your tomorrows." — Ralph Marston

Psalm 96: 1-3
Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, praise his name; proclaim his salvation day after day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples.

Romans 8:28
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

WISE OLD OWL
A wise old owl lived in an oak.
The more he saw the less he spoke.
The less he spoke the more he heard.
Why can't we all be like that wise old bird?

the limerick. Here is one from page 25 of the Chess Amateur, October 1907:

A solver, who lived at Devizes,
Had won a great number of prizes –
A dual or cook,
He'd detect at a look,
And his head swelled up several sizes.