Garry Kasparov Answers Chess Questions From Twitter

Hi, I'm Garry Kasparov,

and I'm here to answer your chess-related

questions from Twitter.

Why do all, question mark,

chess players put at pieces/squares with middle finger?

Do we?

I'm not sure,

I never paid attention to that fact.

Maybe we have to ask

a psychologist, to see enough samples

for us to come up with such a,

such a definite conclusion.

Bishop or knight?

Depends if you are religious or not.

The general assumption is that both (mumbles) pieces

are of equal price, in pawns.

I think Bobby Fischer was the first one

who indicated that bishop

should be valued higher, 3.25,

versus three points for a knight.

I was more reserved,

actually I put 3.15 for a bishop.

But now, with looking at some of the computer games,

I would say that maybe Fischer's evaluation was correct.

After machines played millions of games,

we just learned that Bishop's value

is simply higher,

since in many more cases, it was more useful piece.

Do I have to develop

all of my minor pieces

before activating my Queen?

The answer is yes.

Queen is the strongest piece,

but you could argue it's the weakest one,

because if it's attacked it has to move away,

because it's most valuable piece.

I can come up with many opening positions

where activating the queen is very natural.

So there are many openings where your queen

is being developed as early as move four or five.

I would recommend

for weak players to follow the rule

and not to bring your queen into battle too early.

But for those who are making progress

in the game of chess,

by studying openings professionally,

you have to be cautious all the time

trying to apply general rules,

universally, all the time.

Why do chess players tend to castle

even if it severely restricts the king's movement?

King's safety is the number one priority,

and obviously after castle,

you remove king from the vulnerable position, the center.

So restricting the King's movement

is not as dangerous

as leaving the King in the open.

You are in doubt and you want to castle,

but short or long in 1 and 2?

It depends on your mood.

I would say if you castle short,

it's a roughly even game,

but you cannot expect to gain an advantage,

so castling long is more aggressive, more ambitious,

but it's riskier.

Now with the second one,

Black has very comfortable game,

they can simply castle short

and they have excellent position.

I would probably go short castle,

but maybe it's my age talking.

What is your favorite gambit opening in chess

with a, white, b, black?

I don't think gambits are just offering you

an advantage against a world-prepared open, opponent.

I loved Evan's Gambit,

I played it quite a few games,

and some of them were instructive wins.

Now with Black,

I played a couple of times, Volga Gambit, Benko Gambit,

as it's known in the free world.

I can hardly think of any real gambits with Black

except the Benko Gambit,

where you can, that you can employ

at the professional level.

Mr. Kasparov, in your expert opinion,

why doesn't Anand,

or Carlsen for that matter,

ever use something wild like King's Gambit?

Because it's wild.

Players at that level,

they don't play

wild openings in serious games.

I can tell you, you spend a lot of analyzing it,

and it always ends up with negative results,

so that's why,

if you are big fan of the King's Gambit,

I wouldn't recommend you holding your breath

expecting Carlsen or other top players

employing it in the top tournament.

On another note, do you advocate Evan's Gambit

versus a stronger player,

or will it be crushed these days?

It's hard to say no for Evan's Gambit,

because I won quite a few games,

a very memorable one against Vishy Anand in 1995,

the first time I used Evan's Gambit.

So for strong player,

someone who's known for his or her preparation,

I think you have to be very cautious

by making such a choice.

It depends very much on what you mean,

saying strong player,

so because we can disagree on the definition.

Though I think that if you want to play

such a sharp opening as Evan's Gambit,

sacrificing a pawn at b4,

you are not thinking of equalizing,

you're thinking about taking initiative

and crushing your opponents.

So again, it's up to you,

but just bear in mind

that Evan's Gambit has disappeared completely

from the games of the top players.

Can anyone recommend a good book on chess endgame?

Mark Dvoretsky's book, Endgame.

It helps strong players to become stronger,

so I enjoyed reading the book,

and you can always learn something from there,

even if you, if you are weak,

relatively weak player,

or a very strong one.

Is control of the center

one of the most important things

you must do in order to win the game of chess?

Yeah, it is very, very important,

but I can give you many examples

where you control the center,

but your king is being mated.

I would strongly recommend that you put king safety

as number one priority.

Tech/AI types,

as a genuine question,

how much should we read into the ability

of a computer to quickly get really good

at Chess or Go?

It's impressive,

but it's also about logic and involves

very constrained and ultimately limited choices.

I think you answered the question.

It's about the logic,

but it's a closed system,

because we establish the rules.

We should recognize that the moment

the open-ended system

has been limited to a closed framework

machines will do a better job

by simply just going around this,

and establishing their own set of priorities.

Chess, and other games, they, like Go,

they offer an excellent opportunity

to study the ability of machines.

For us to look into much bigger problems

of the universe, and nature.

Learning chess.

Why does the horsey one move so crazy?

Why not straight lines like castle head?

I can tell you that in any version of chess,

there are different rules and different patterns.

For instance, the Japanese game called Shogi,

it's, has many different rules

that are very unusual for our eyes,

because we're trained just to look

at our version of chess.

I think it's just,

it's somehow, it's a combination

of the different abilities of the pieces,

and I can tell you that

our forebears did a great job

by actually coming up with such a balanced game.

Thank you very much for asking all those questions.

They were very different.

Some of them are too professional, to my taste,

some of them are very primitive,

again, to my taste,

but that's the beauty of the game of chess.

You could enjoy the game, you can ask questions,

even if you are a very weak player,

or if you are experienced club player,

or even a very, very strong player.

And that creates this global chess family,

and I'm always happy to address any concern

that comes from every layer of chess knowledge

in the world.