What is blindfold chess (BF)?
According to Wikipedia it is a way to play chess, when play is conducted without players having sight of the position of pieces nor physical contact with them. How many times have you been amazed by somebody’s ability to easily and effortlessly calculate long variations during a game or come up with a neat tactics? I can bet that players who do such things are able to play well at blindfold chess. What does the BF chess do to help your game? First of it helps a lot in developing a good board visualization. When player is able to visualize a position in the head his calculation speed greatly increases, blunders are almost completely eliminated; new tactical ideas come up during a game and so on. Every strong player today is able to play blindfold chess.
This is a list of 27 most important chess traits represented in form of quotes from the greatest chess players of all times: Kaparov, Fischer, Karpov, Lasker, Tarrasch and many others. To be good at something we need to understand what and how the greatest think about the subject. That applies to chess as well; by exploring minds of greatest chess players it is possible to better understand the nature of this game. Enough philosophy, enjoy the list of quotes about chess!
What is chess? According to the Oxford dictionary “a board game for two players, the object of which is to put the opponent’s king under a direct attack, leading to checkmate”.
In other words chess is a board game in which the main idea is to destroy your opponents army and finally to checkmate the king. If you are completely new to chess I recommend reading Basic Chess Rules: Easy Guide to Learn Chess article first.What makes chess so unique from the rest of the board games is the fact that there are almost infinite number of positions that can arise.
ELO is the most popular rating system which is used to calculate chess strength of players in FIDE, USCF and the majority of chess federations and online chess websites (like ICC or Yahoo! chess). The higher ELO rating is the stronger a player is. In ELO system, a player moves from one class to another (say from class C to class B) for every 200 points earned. If the difference between ELO ratings of two players is 200 points, the strongest player will win about 75% of games. If the difference between ratings is 400 points, the stronger player will win about 95% of games. If the difference is 600 points the stronger side will most likely win 99.999% of all games. Let’s say somebody with 1400 ELO plays somebody with 2000 ELO. The second one will win all games. Well, except for those drawn in case of tornado or fire…
How it all begins…
Chess is very old and wise game which was invented in India about 2000 years ago. In the very beginning, only Indian kings played this game. Instead of going to war two Indian shahs (kings) just set down with the chess board between them and decided whose land is whose and who is stronger. This way they saved their armies and lives of thousands of innocent people. The game of chess was called the game of kings.
The rules were almost identical to the modern chess. Queen was able to move only one square in each direction. There was no “castle” and “en passant”.
Online chess is fun. Online chess is cool. Online chess is easy to play. But have you ever think about how much time do you spend playing online chess and later wondering why are you not doing well over the board, at real “wooden” chess (or may you be using plastic USCF chess set) somewhere on the Atlantic Open with standard time control? While playing online most people most commonly play so-called quick chess, with time control 10 or 15 minutes for game or even shorter. This kind of chess has NO REAL VALUE for improving your standard time control chess.
Here is a very nice collection of greatest chess players of XX century. If you know well the characters of these players you will easily understand why one or another player is presented the way he is. We all know that Tahl was a great fighter and never accepted (well… almost never) draws. That’s why he is presented in form of boxer with the chess board on a boxing glove. Karpov was famous for his prophylactic moves, so he is shown in from of archer. Smyslov treated chess more like an art than a sport. He is a music composer in this collection. There are total of 13 chess grandmasters in this collection: Karpov, Kotov, Tahl, Botvinik, Pologaevski, Smyslov, Boleslavski, Keres, Spaski, Bronstein, Petrosian, Stein, Taimanov.
At what age is it better to learn to play chess? Maybe at 5 years old maybe at 10.
Basically the earlier kid starts to play chess the better, since young mind is more flexible and learns things faster.
However, I believe that it’s mostly matters not when you start playing chess, but how much time and effort you dedicated to that game. If you start playing at 6 you may become a grandmaster by 16 with right training and talent. If you started at 30 maybe you’ll be able to become a grandmaster by 40.
