Chess for Zebras Quotes

“Chess ideas do not just slot into unfurnished apartments ready to unpack. On the contrary, they are smothered by the assistance of related ideas and arrive in a heavily furnished place, often nursing wounds from the battles they have waged with old ideas on their way out.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“The common-sense view of learning is that we learn by ‘filling up’ our heads with things, as if our heads were buckets and we learned by filling the bucket with knowledge.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“and if I were to sum up the message they contain in one line it would be this: improvement begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“Thinking of a zebra’ therefore means being more open to experience and less constrained by convention. It means allowing yourself to think differently.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“Many players just go ahead and try to find out whether it is winning or not, only to realize it is not so clear-cut and then play the simpler move but with much less time on the clock.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“Yet the Greeks also had Kairos, a bit of a geezer. He was not so much god of the time, but rather the god of qualitative time, the god of timing.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“1 d4 d5 2 c4 e5 3 dxe5 d4 4 a3!?”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“In these cases it makes sense to speak of the ‘opportunity cost’ of certain moves, in terms of what is lost in Material, Quality or Time, just as economists speak of the ‘opportunity cost’ of buying one thing instead of another.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“In light of Hübner’s critique of Kasparov’s three dimensions, I felt it was a mistake to refer to (non-clock) ‘Time’ as a dimension of chess. Firstly, because it is easy to conflate and confuse with clock time, and secondly because the significance of ‘time’ varies enormously.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“To be honest, I felt that I should play on for a while, but was scared that I would screw up and somehow lose my a- and b-pawns for his a-pawn.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“Aronian made the interesting point that if I could force a passed a-pawn I might have winning chances,”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras

“chess games are rarely lost by oversights but rather by “the failure to apprehend certainties”.”
― Jonathan Rowson, Chess for Zebras