Daily Inspiration Quote by Nigel Short

“A good sacrifice” is supposed to be a moral phrase, the kind you’d expect from a sermon or a war memoir. Nigel Short hijacks it for chess, then sharpens it into something closer to streetwise mischief: the point of a sacrifice isn’t purity or even correctness, it’s impact. He’s not praising sloppy play so much as admitting what spectators and many players quietly know: in real games, psychology is part of the board.

The sly provocation is in “not necessarily sound.” Chess culture fetishizes objectivity, the clean verdict of engines and endgame tablebases. Short, a world-class grandmaster from the pre-engine age, is winking at the gap between theoretical truth and human decision-making under pressure. A sacrifice that’s dubious on paper can still be “good” if it creates a fog your opponent can’t navigate in the allotted time. “Dazed and confused” is the tell; it’s not about winning a pawn, it’s about winning a minute, a rhythm, a sense of control.

Context matters. Short came up in an era when preparation was deep but not omniscient, and over-the-board intuition had real leverage. Even now, in a world of near-perfect analysis, the competitive edge often comes from dragging the game into positions that are hard to evaluate, where the cost of a single misstep is catastrophic. The quote celebrates chess as a contact sport in formalwear: legal violence, strategically delivered, with the opponent’s mind as the real target.