p.46 A knowledge of combination is the foundation of positional play.
Richard Reti
p.46 You will notice that in every game [presented in chapter 2], a tactical oversight of various degrees
of seriousness allowed the victor to achieve his aim. Although this is primarily a book about strategy... watch out for tactics!
p.63 A plan needs to be continuously moderated or even changed completely according to circumstances.
These days at least, you hardly ever see a game in which a player kept to the one and same plan throughout the middle-game.
Even if the basic intention behind his schemes was the same... a multitude of frequently changing mini-plans was being employed.
p.77 Let's assume our opponent is sensible enough to develop his pieces to decent squares, fight for the
centre with his pawns, and avoid doing anything reckless with his king. We will therefore need to soften him up gradually
if we are going to get the win we deserve.
This can best be done by targeting one or more weak points in his pawn structure. In what follows
we shall look at various techniques for forcing and exploiting such weaknesses - or even persuading the opponent to create
them for us!
p.86 Every position has to be evaluated according to its particular features.
p.88 Here we see the superiority of a bishop over a knight in an endgame where there are pawns that can
be targeted on both sides of the board... whereas the black knight has been deprived of all its mobility by the need to defend
b7.
p.155 An essential component of any plan is preventing the opponent from playing the moves he wants to play.
p.163 In general, pawns are strongest when they are adjacent to each other in the centre, as on e4 and f4.
The question of whether to advance one of them to the 5th rank is always of the greatest importance.
p.176 This retreat reminds us that the value of a piece is to be judged by how well it contributes to the
health of the whole army, not its own individual worth.
p.177 The queen and knight are well known to be a formidable attacking force, as their different powers
increases the chance of finding a key to unlock a defense.
p.185 A so-called "hole" is a weak point of this kind. It is a square in a player's pawn structure that
can no longer be protected by one of his pawns. If the hole is on a centre square or another point of strategic interest,
it can make a fine outpost for an enemy knight.
p.189 As so often, we need to remind ourselves that it isn't the fortune of the individual piece
that matters - it is how it functions with the other pieces. For this reason it is often completely meaningless to
count the number of squares, in the centre or otherwise, that a piece controls or attacks.
p.229 It is incredible that the Hydra computer can crush Michael Adams 5
1/2 - 1/2 in a match [28 June, 2005], and yet not have any understanding.
