Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
17 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think maturity is maybe the most important thing because Pragga and Gukesh have taken some horrible blows.”
02 / belief
“In most cases, at least in my experience, the way to get out of it is to stop thinking about how to solve it and almost lighten yourself and get back to playing a normal game for normal reasons.”
03 / belief
“What I think is helping him is playing blitz tournaments nonstop online. That allows him to keep there, and it might be the best way to train for a modern computerized opening preparation era, where there’s so little to do with preparation because the computer solves everything, but you get to test every concept a million times over the board.”
04 / belief
“I realized that the same people who caused me a lot of problems earlier in the year — I was at least able to deal with them. It’s a work in progress because they also constantly work at self-improvement and so on, but at least I felt I could confront them on equal terms.”
05 / belief
“Some lines will go that far, but equally, you can use the computer to solve the problem that the computer has created, which is, if you take a single line and you go, I think you can go very, very far.”
06 / commitment
“Every single line you refute and clean up, and you feel like you’ve cleaned your entire house of clutter, and you feel wonderful. It’s a double-edged sword, I will concede that, but it’s a pain in the neck when you want to rely on something.”
07 / belief
“There is some draw. I think you take, and then bishop b8 and then this knight is loose.”
08 / evaluation
“New versions, we are never going to catch up with computers. But for playing amongst ourselves, this is completely new territory, and there’s a lot of scope for creativity and everything we used to look for.”
09 / recommendation
“The top grandmaster’s insight has to be, take a look at the club player, gauge what work he might have done, have a sense of what areas he specializes in, then avoid them at all costs because that’s the best strategy for success.”
10 / evaluation
“” Because I thought Carlsen is of the level of Kramnik and Topalov, so playing against him gives me a good sense of how they’ll play, how the games will materialize, and so on.”
11 / preference
“I played a little bit here and there whenever I could because I still like playing, and for me, chess tournaments are primarily social events where you meet everyone, and you hang out with everyone again.”
12 / evaluation
“My thing was, I’ll check the top two things, and I’ll figure out the rest, which was not as silly as it sounds today because back in the day, that’s how you played chess.”
13 / evaluation
“Kasparov drew with Khalifman, Karpov drew with Gelfand, and I realized I’m in first place.”
14 / evaluation
“The thing is, because I started out with an early plus score against him, he saw it as a stiff rivalry.”
15 / evaluation
“The idea was, you are a better natural player than me, so you should try to steer the game through to Slav’s more harmless — which is how we came under the Kramnik approach — more harmless waters.”
16 / evaluation
“Whenever somebody tells me, “I don’t know how you concentrate for seven hours,” I understand that they don’t know how we play chess, or that they haven’t played chess themselves because we do not concentrate for seven hours.”
17 / evaluation
“What I think made the difference was, I was suddenly facing people who didn’t resign the game very quickly, who didn’t collapse, especially Karpov.”