Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0365: How to play chess blindfolded

Episode Date: July 31, 2015

Alvaro asks about playing chess blindfolded. How are chess grandmasters able to keep track of a game in their mind while it progresses, without ever even looking at the board? BONUS: Here’s a quizzing set you can use to memorize the key words of this poem: Memorize strange meeting Don’t forget to check the ELO Boosting […]

Master of Memory 365 Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Alvaro submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Alvaro says, I'm interested in playing chess blindfolded. I know that virtually all chess grandmaster in chess, but from what I've researched, the fact is that most chess players are able to do this

simply because they know the game so deeply that certain pieces, moves, and parts of the board have certain significances to them. So for example, if there's a pawn at d4, it means very many complex things for the game. Any arrangement of three pieces for a chess grandmaster who's been in the game for that long and has really seen deeply how many different things can happen when those things happen can identify that sort of configuration of pieces, and it means a lot to him, whereas it means practically nothing to an inexperienced chess player like me. It's very much like learning a new language. Certain characters arranged in a certain way mean something to someone who knows the language, but mean absolutely nothing to me.

So the letters stop in English might mean nothing to somebody in Japan who's never really seen much English. And stop to me has certain, I don't know, it has feelings behind it. It has the color red and an octagon with it. Those are just natural associations for me when I see the capital word stop that just aren't there for somebody who doesn't know anything about English. At the same time, just through my speculation and some thinking about this, there are ways that you can accelerate this process through the use of mnemonics, although really the end goal is to know the chess board and the chess pieces so well that they have these same significances to you. So don't get the end result mixed up with the cause, the

cause and the effect. I think that the effect for the grand masters is not the cause. So they're not so good because they are able to do these things memorized, they're able to do these things memorized. They're able to do these things from memory and blindfolded simply because they're so good. But at the same time, chess strategy and chess memorization of the board and all of that can be accelerated through accelerated learning techniques. For example, a large part of learning this, of course, is learning the characters of each chess piece. And I'm not talking about just the way that they move, I'm talking about what each one has, what value it brings to the table as an agent of winning the game.

And you can accelerate the learning of this through giving each piece a mnemonic character. Maybe your knights have certain, I don't know, maybe the knights are horses, and you might think of them in a more complex way than a normal horse. In fact, you could have the two knights of one team have slightly different characters so that you can remember where they are on the board. So that's the way that you can accelerate the chess pieces themselves. Another major aspect of the game that beginning chess players don't understand quite as deeply as advanced chess players is board control. Now, you can perhaps accelerate board control by imagining the center of the board being different from the rest

of the board. Maybe it's higher on a hill or something because of how valuable it is. But at the same time, I would say that you can accelerate this not just through mnemonics, but actually through minimalization or exclusivity. So you can minimize the game by taking all the pieces off the board, except, let's say, a pawn and a king, which is one of the major ways that Josh Waitzkin, the author of The Art of Learning and a chess master, the way that he learned a big part of it was actually minimalizing the game so that he would play basically pawn and king versus king.

And then playing that way against a real expert in chess teaches him things about board control and about deeply the way that the game works that you simply don't understand if you're playing with all of the players. It's too complex to get that deeply. So that's the principle of exclusivity. You're starting small and you're expanding from there. And then you might choose to do king and knight or king and bishop, and you learn the values of those individual pieces that way as well. Again, Alvaro, I don't know chess well enough to give you the most detailed advice, but this is the best advice that I can give you and what I would do if I were to try to learn chess that deeply so that it's just a part of me and I can play it blindfolded because I know it that well.

Thanks for the question, Alvaro, and I would appreciate an iTunes review if you can do that for me. And for anyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.