ANNOUNCMENT! The Top Ten Chess Quotemasters (QMs)
We are in truth but pieces on this chess board of life, which in the end we leave, only to drop one by one into the grave of nothingness. (c 1120) - Omar Khayyam
So, who are the chess quote GOATs? Do you have an opinion?
Hey, it's no problem if you haven't considered the issue! I'm more than willing to fill that particular void in your thoughts with my opinions!!
What makes my opinions better than yours? For starters, my opinion is informed by decades of chess and a (diminished) chess library that takes up multiple shelves in my library. Primarily, though, I'm the one who took the time to put some thought into this sorely overlooked aspect of chess history, a Top Ten ranking of the greatest Chess QuoteMasters (QMs) of all time. Have you?
Still, it's just a set of opinions. Besides, if you don't fully agree with my judgments, though I can hardly imagine, let alone condone, such a contrary, contentious, and confused state of consciousness, then chess.com generously provided a comments section so you can express your agreements, disagreements, quibbles, corrections, expansions, nominations, exhortations, suggestions, and questions. Some of which I will respond to!
In this blog, I briefly introduce the candidates. Then, I provide a case study of a QM non-entity (me). This introductory post serves two primary purposes. First, it provides the framework you can expect to see in subsequent blogs. Second, it describes how I determined who merited a spot in the Top Ten QMs and decided where they fell in the top ten rankings.
It will be two to three weeks before you'll see who took the #10 spot, a lapse that occurs because I also have regular chess Hall of Fame posts and a monthly chess zodiac post. An individual post in every one of these three series requires a bit of time and a lot of love...or patience, which sometimes supplants the love. Plus, I'm analyzing games and creating puzzles for a chess book. Then there's my non-chess life...if one assumes that mowing and weeding constitute a life. In other words, I manage to keep busy. While, with bated breath, you await discovering who took that #10 spot, you can form your initial opinions and record them in the comments section (hint, hint).
Sample Biography: KevinSmithIdiot
Reminder About Those "Questions for the Reader"
The candidates, in alphabetical order, are Alekhine, Bronstein, Capablanca, Dvoretsky, Fischer, Kasparov, Kotov, Lakdawala, Emanuel Lasker, Mednis, Nimzowitsch, Nunn, Pachman, Romanovsky, Seirawan, Silman, Soltis, Spielmann, Steinitz, Tal, Tarrasch, Tartakower, and Znovsko-Borovsky. No, you can't add anyone. All the selecting has already been done, and that's that, so it's too late to nominate anyone else. And the choices for #1 to #10 are also locked in the electrons orbiting inside my computer (maybe). So there!
You'll have noted there are more than ten candidates, twenty-three in point of fact! Well, of course there are! Otherwise, you could start making very well-informed guesses about the top three after the first five were announced. Instead, there will be at least a mild attempt to shroud the results in a bit of mystery as we count down to numbers three, two, and one!
Thought I'd prompt you up front on some of the questions you might want to ponder while reading so you can provide pertinent, perhaps even scathing, comments at the end.
| Who do you think was left out and why should they have been included? Maybe I'll add them! My schedule is a bit lax. |
| Who do you think won't make the QM Top Ten at all? Why do you think that? |
| Who do you think will take the number ten spot? |
| Who do you think will take the number one spot? |
Kevin [aka, The Grumpy Olde Man (GOM)], like most of us, was born to two parents. Unlike most of y'all, he was born two blocks from a toxic waste dump, otherwise known as the Love Canal. Other than the occasional mental twitch, this seems to have affected him in what he believes are useful ways. For instance, he espouses the notion that there are at least ten sides to everything. But he'll let you figure that out on your own time. Let's get this brief bio done and over with.
Our Dostoyevsky fan, then in his teens, was spotted and tagged by a US Chess Federation Senior Master (top 50 in the nation at the time) as someone who would make master. Sorry to disappoint you, Don.😭 Instead, it was off to the Air Force, pilot training, and attendance at over a dozen colleges...I actually graduated from some of them! Got married, changed diapers for a couple kids, retired from the military, became a cybersecurity guy who made lists that should have been naming other people, retired again, wrote a couple chess books, discovered chess blogging, won some blogging awards, opened a blogging club or three or more, and judge blogs when not blogging. (Still working on a third chess book on chessable.com, in collaboration with IM Attila Turzo.)
Kevin has published two books on chessable and is collaborating on a third with IM Attila Turzo.
Hey, wait a minute! Isn't this advertising? Why, yes, it is! But chess.com allows that as long as you don't get carried away with it.
The winner of Season Six of BlogChamps, @KevinSmithIdiot has published a number of series on topics such as: trapping pieces; analyzing positions during and after games; satires such as 101 reasons he hates chess and what cheating will look like in the future; typical blogging mistakes to avoid; chess zodiacs that list the birthdates of famous and infamous players born in a specific month of the year; and the experiences he went through in writing and publishing his first two books. All of those, and more, can be found at KevinSmithIdiot’s Blog.
Okay, that's the example, and I don't intend to spend much more time than that on any of the QMs.
Why does this section exist? Because a lot of the QM's quotes can be found in books! D'oh.
Okay, let's get to the heart of the matter, the ten quotes allowed to each QM candidate. I wanted to give an example of each section, so am throwing some of my chess thoughts out there for praise or vilification, whatever suits your commenting needs in the moment when you put fingers to keyboard or thumbs to screen.
Would that I was even a smidgen famous and had a better set of quotes...then again, were that the case I'd be one of the pictured candidates instead of a "question mark" (refer to the candidate pictures). Then someone else would be delivering this epiphanous moment. Instead...it's just me.
You'll observe Quote #1 in the image above. As I explain in the QM Criteria, it's important to me to be able to visualize at least one quote. The above image of Caissa, goddess of chess, holding up a foreboding and perhaps fickle finger of fate, is my visual image for the quote included.
I'm trying to look cool, calm, and collected, but this is chess goddess criticism! Please don't check out my armpits. The slightly slumped over posture of the would-be player is reflective of the fact I've spent a few decades on the planet. My wife harangues me about that, much as Caissa chastises me for focusing on the wrong things over the board.
You won't see all the above gibberish in the remaining QM posts. Today all we're doing is setting the stage for their triumphs.
Let's move on to my nine remaining quotes. I could have created images for several of these, but the necessary and sufficient goal for each of the QMs will simply be to demonstrate that one of their quotes was readily converted into a resonating image. To be honest, I'm struggling with one individual whose quotes otherwise clearly merit entry in this list of the top ten QMs of all time.
Caissa, my siren, my muse, she who calls me, inspires me, binds me.
Stupid is easy. Thinking is hard.
Confusion is a great state of mind. It leads you to question things, sometimes even assumptions.
Paralysis by analysis is real. Sometimes you just gotta wing it and hope you can figure it out on the fly.
It sucked when I reached the point where winning a pawn didn't mean I was going to win the game. I gloated once I realized it could be easier to win by giving away a pawn...or more!
I don't care what the computer spits out. If you can't explain it in terms I understand, then it means nothing to me.
The Keep it Simple, Smith (KISS) Principle will win you a lot of games. Plus, huge bonus, it makes it easier to close your eyes and clear your head when the computer is spitting out nonsensical moves during post-game analysis.
Why hasn't anybody written a chess book about this? Meh, it doesn't matter. Now it's mine, all mine! Mwahahaha!!
Out of the corner of my eye I had a startling glimpse of the goddess of chess while playing a game, but she was gone when I looked up...or was she there on the board the whole time?
I hope you counted to check my math. Ten quotes not nine, nor eleven. Certainly, no other number, for this would offend the eye and sprain the brain...in the end, there can be only ten. [Actually, I make a special dispensation for numbers one and two, but you'll understand why when you get there...several months from now. Hope you weren't in a hurry!]
I would hope some sharp-eyed critic out there would ask this critical question: What criteria did I use to determine who earned a spot in the Top Ten and who didn't, let alone who was #1 versus being #2 or #3, and so on all the way to #10?
You asked for it, you got it! Right here, and right now. Below, a set of filters used to detect the worthiest and filter out the others.
| #1 | What makes a good quote? Gut feel!💘 Darned if what they said doesn't resonate somewhere in my chess soul! |
| #2 | Must have ten quotable quotes that I could find without too much painful research on my part. |
| #3 | It must have been written or translated into English. I leave it to others to manage their linguistic chess QMs. |
| #4 | If it's a full paragraph...it isn't a quote. |
| #5 |
If it made me laugh, that quote is probably a winner. |
| #6 | If it made me laugh and cry, that quote is almost definitely a winner. |
| #7 | If it seemed glaringly obvious, I tried to consider when it was said. Sometimes that worked, sometimes...not. |
| #8 | Can I visualize at least one of any candidate's quotes? Can I create a picture that captures the essence of the quote? |
| #9 | If candidate #23's fifth-best quote is better than candidate #4's best quote, it's likely candidate #23 ranks higher! |
| #10 | Because I said so. Or you can consider yourselves my external panel of experts and I'll consider reshuffling all the QMs after considering the group's collective comments from all twelve posts. (Not bloody likely to happen, sorry.) |
For each QM, I will be adding my take on why #9 was better than #10, and so forth, with every post.
There might be a quote shootout, with five to ten additional quotes, if two QM candidates are evenly matched after their first ten quotes. This is unlike the 2024 World Blitz CC, and more like a golf tournament with a sudden death playoff. There can be no ties, but if it comes down to a coin flip, a spin of the roulette wheel, a random dart toss, or a roll of the dice to decide, so be it. Ultimately, I wield the scythe that separates and slots the candidates. [Tiebreaks will usually occur behind the scenes.]
In the meantime, please observe that at this specific point in time, I am the leading contender for the top spot!! (Brilliant, Kevin, just brilliant!!) That ends, of course, as soon as I list #10 and display their QMasterly comments.😭 But until then, I am the chess QM-supreme. (I don't have ten chess quotes by Omar Khayyam, so he loses to me by default, not having met Criteria #2. Even though his one-liner offered a great opening line for this post.)
Are there any flaws in your approach?
Heretic!
Sigh, of course there are. For instance, for most of the potential QMs I relied on quotes easily found in the wild, sayings that were gyrating around the meme-verse, t-shirts, and on the lips of players and coaches everywhere and everywhen. However, some of these folks wrote very quotable material, but for some reason their quotes have not spread broadly across the chess echosystem. ("Echosystem" is my second-newest contribution to the Urban Dictionary: Hello KevinSmithIdiot; echoverse is my most recent entry, comprising a system of echosystems.)
For those whose quotes have not yet infiltrated every nook and cranny of the chess echosystem, I was forced to do page-by-page research of books they had written...though only after first filtering through a List of Chess Notes Feature Articles by Edward Winter that offered alphabetical access regarding information about chess notables, starting with Alekhine and closing with Zukertort. [After that the site moved on to innumerable other tidbits of interest for any would-be or actual chess historian.]
Okay, what's your point? You did a lot of research, so what?
In my circular way of getting to the point, I found that I turned up a lot of very quotable material going through a book for those whose sayings did not yet appear widely across the chess quote echosystem. I harbor hope these twelve posts will alleviate some of that lack of respect for people who are eminently quotable.
Still, the process left me to ponder whether an in-depth look into only some candidate's published works was an injustice to those who had plenty of quotes already bouncing around the echoverse. Bottom line, I chose not to do a page-by-page of every candidate's works. One, I don't have books by all of them. Two, I don't have an infinite amount of time and energy.
To double down, I'm not going change my approach. As a character said in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, "So it goes."
Reminder About Reader Questions
Many of these questions will change with every entry in the QM Top Ten. But that seems kind of obvious.🤣
| Q1: Who do you think was left out and why should they have been included? Maybe I'll add them! My schedule is a bit lax. |
| Q2: Who do you think won't make the QM Top Ten at all? Why do you think that? |
| Q3: Who do you think will take the number ten spot? |
| Q4: Who do you think will take the number one spot? Why do you think that? |
In the table below I'll track names, if not full responses. I suspect tracking the answers to question two may be too much to deal with. We'll see how that goes.
| Question | Your Votes (last updated: 23 May 6 A.M. EDT) |
| 1 | Philidor (1), Morphy (1), Giri (1), Grischuk (1), Rozman (1), Tony Miles (1) |
| 2 | Capablanca (1), @DocSimoo's Grandma (1), Alekhine (1), Lakdawala (1), Znosko-Borovsky (1) |
| 3 | Bronstein (1), Nimzowitsch (1), Spassky (1), Tarrasch (1) |
| 4 | Nimzowitsch (1), Fischer (½*), Tal (½*), Kasparov (1) |
*@DocSimoo effectively split his vote between Fischer and Tal.
Okay, I believe I've demonstrated (QED) what the posts in this series are going to look like. It's as simple as that. Short, sweet, surely spellbinding! Well, that's the goal. Ultimately, if someone besides me reads these, I'll consider the success box checked.😉😎
The stage is set, hope I've intrigued you enough that you'll come back to see who was ranked #10 all the way through #1...and then a special edition with quotes from all the contenders who didn't make my Top Ten, but about whom you might have your own opinions on where they should have fallen.
Stay tuned for QM #10! Who will it be and why? I guarantee my guess is better than yours, because I've already written that draft blog! No fair hacking my draft blogs to obtain that information prior to me hitting the Publish button.
Next week I'll be returning to my regularly scheduled Chess Hall of Fame series with #44.
Cheers!
Kevin
The laws of chess are as beautiful as those governing the universe—and as deadly. Katherine Neville
To be great is to be misunderstood. Ralph Waldo Emerson
...and I'm the most misunderstood person in the world. [Most teenagers at some time in their teen years, including yours truly who had a bit of a reputation as a smarta__ to maintain during that period of my life. Now I'm just The Grumpy Old Man (The GOM).]
