had won the Dutch Championship: "He hasn't got a clue. He is the worst player in the whole wide world. ... Dear Lodewijk. ... You've won the title and I want to congratulate you. But I think you cannot tell a knight from a bishop and I'm prepared to prove it, too. ... We'll play a match." Prins declined Donner's match offer. "After I resigned this game with perfect self-control and solemnly shook hands with my opponent in the best of Anglo-Saxon traditions, I rushed home, where I threw myself onto my bed, howling and screaming, and pulled the blankets over my face." Donner's remark about winning from a dead-lost position: "I couldn't resist saying something that I had never said before after winning a game of chess. I may have thought it, but I had never said it. I said, 'Sorry. "Chess is and will always be a game of chance." "It is mainly the irreparability of a mistake that distinguishes chess from other sports. A whole game long and there is only one point to score. Just one mistake and the battle is lost, even though the fight may go on for hours. ... That's why a mistake hits so hard in chess." On playing the black pieces against the move 1.e4: "I don't like this move. And they know it." Donner, The Master Game, BBC2 "How different is chess in the United States. The game of chess has never been held in great esteem by the North Americans. Their culture is steeped in deeply anti-intellectual tendencies. They pride themselves in having created the game of poker. It is their national game, springing from a tradition of westward expansion, of gun-slinging skirt chasers who slept with cows and horses. They distrust chess as a game of Central European immigrants with a homesick longing for clandestine conspiracies in quiet coffee houses. Their deepest conviction is that bluff and escalation will achieve more than scheming and patience (witness their foreign policy)." "... it doesn't take much insight into human nature to predict that Fischer will not be world champion for long. His quirks, moods and whims will turn against him at the moment when he has reached the top. He'll hit out hard, but at nothing but thin air." "The difference between the sexes is remarkable in chess, but not any more so, to my mind, than in any other