Memory

To be a good chess player requires memorization of lots of information. This does not mean that you have to have a great memory, but you have to do the work of memorizing things.

Some of this memory work can be fun. Doing chess problems regularly on one of the online sites will train your memory (and visualization) in tactical patterns.

Some of the memory work can be tedious like memorizing the proper sequence of opening moves, or the patterns for theoretical endgames.

 My wife recently bought a short course in memory from The Great Courses company. It covers some memorization techniques and a general overview the current state of science on memory. The basic techniques do not have much direct application to chess, but the science does suggest some possibilities.

Memorization is best done by layering on top of known concepts. We can hold in short term memory about 7 things. How complex those things can be depend on our current knowledge and understanding. The "real" starting positions for some openings is very deep. One of the daunting things about the Ruy Lopez is how deep the mainline can be. Memorizing the 15 moves to get to the mainline start can be near impossible for a beginning player. Of course, they do not have to memorize that deep, because their opponents do not know it either. If you understand the concepts behind each move, have a small "story" that explains how to deal with variations, and understand the tactical patterns behind each of the traps it becomes much easier.

After 13...Bf8, the starting position for the Ruy Lopez Breyer

Memorizing K&P endings is another near impossible task for the beginner, but learning counting, the square of the pawn, and the opposition help immensely in learning these patterns.

We memorize things better when we have an emotional connection to the information.  Great chess players are often good at several other things. One of these is music, which also requires a great deal of memorization. Musicians often stress how important it is to feel while playing, to make an emotional connection to the music. Stevie Ray Vaughan went so far as to say he got in trouble when he tried to think about what he was playing rather than just feel. Since we have emotional connection to our recent games, especially the losses, it is important to analyze them as soon as possible after the game, and to use that emotion to help memorize opening lines, precise endgames, and tactical patterns from those games.

One key to better memorization is to understand forgetting. After studying material the amount we retain falls off dramatically. Ebbinghaus was an early pioneer in the study of memory, and his meticulous research allowed him to display the forgetting function (notice the logarithmic scale on the horizontal time axis)

This lead to further research that indicates we should review newly learned material very shortly after the initial study, and that review can be shorter than the initial study. Further review can be shorter still and after a longer period of time.

http://www.scilogs.com/the_science_talent_project/my-simple-spaced-repetition-system/

In my experience the broad concepts are more easily remembered and the details get lost first. I suspect that subsequent review allows us to better chunk up the hard details based on the more easily remembered concepts. Or you might be the opposite, and some details are easily remembered and the concepts become clearer as more details are retained.

I will get down to brass tacks on how this will change how I study chess in subsequent posts.

Following Kaufman - October 2013

This ebook collection of games is available for free on Smashwords in epub format.

I have selected 321 recent master games that are relevant to "The Kaufman Repertoire for Black & White" and present them with a diagram for each move.

This is the first issue in a monthly series.

TCCL 2014 round 1

We lost the first round to a strong team. I managed to squeak out the only win.

My opponent played an early Bg5 against my King's Indian Defense, and I forgot not only the line against it (Spassky-Fisher 1992) but the general approach to the Averbakh.

I ended up with an unfavorable Benoni setup, and had to defend against a strong kingside attack. Short on time, my opponent missed the killer move, and allowed me to give up a piece for 3 center pawns and transition into an endgame, where my central pawn mass proved to be too much trouble for him in the time he had left.

Recently I picked up an ideas I am going to try to apply now. The old idea was simply to study an opening after as part of analyzing the game just played. The new idea is to look at an opening 3 times in a day, with an hour or two break between first and second look, then more than four hours between second and third.

Flash Cards as Study Book

Dan Heisman has many excellent articles in his Novice Nook series on chesscafe.com. The one that is pertinent to this post is "Getting The Edge". In this article he gives 14 things we should do to improve.

Number 12 is to create your own personalized study book in which you document mistakes you have made and how you think you can keep from repeating them. I think the flash card format is excellent for this, and it is my major use of flash cards. They compose the deck I review as warm up before tournament games.

As Heisman points out, removing negatives from our play is as important as adding positives (e.g. tactical patterns), and it can be harder.

Noel Skelton Open 2013

The good news is that I played Wesley So in the first round. He spent a lot of time in the opening. I think he was deciding the variation that would be the safest way to win. He appeared tired and jet lagged. I hope he had a good time. He won the tournament, of course.

 The bad news is that I played terrible the whole tournament. Lots of visualization errors. I think I need to analyze my vote chess games without an analysis board or notes, then write down the variations, then use a set.

I found a few holes in the opening repertoire file I am using to filter games of interest, including the mainline of the early open Catalan that Wesley So played.

Chess Study Tools: Status Report

I am writing some programs to help me study chess. In the last few months I have been working steadily on creating a program to write out an ebook based on an input pgn file. This was to allow the bulk of writing of chess books in a chess program by annotating moves and exporting the games to a pgn file, and also to create an means to easily review a set of games filtered from a chess database.

I have completed a prototype and have ironed out the most egregious bugs. The idea was to present each game as a chapter and each move as a position.  In an ebook a chess diagram using a chess font does not take up a lot of space, unlike a paper book. The font needs a lot of work.

I successfully used this on a recent vacation to review a bunch of games without using a chess set, just my tablet.

Here is a sample of Ruy Lopez games filtered on Kaufman's Repertoire for Black (2012) as I understand it.

US Open 2013

I did alright with a score of 5 out of 9 (3+2-4=). I basically played at my rated strength with a gain of 11 points. The field was very full of class A and Expert players. There were lots of young players. I ran into better opening preparation in two games. I did not take proper advantage of an inexact move order with one of my opponents, but gathered a better understanding of some King's Indian structures from that game.

I have a lot of material to go through. Two of my wins were against much lower rated players, and the other seven games were against experts. I think there is a lot of good learning material in those games.

As usual, I was head down in my games, and did not get too look at the top boards.