[chessmind] Dennis Monokroussos: Visualization, blindfold chess and Fritz

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Posted by Dennis Monokroussos:
Visualization, blindfold chess and Fritz
http://chessmind.powerblogs.com/posts/1215924187.shtml


   One of the fundamental skills a chess player needs to have is the
   ability to visualize the board. By this I don't mean that one has
   something like a picture of a board in their mind's eye - that may or
   may not be the case.* Rather, it's the ability to mentally maintain
   and manipulate the position in a way that allows the efficient and
   accurate calculation and evaluation of variations. How does one
   cultivate this skill? As kids say, or at least used to: Duh! The
   answer is to practice, obviously.
   But how best to practice? If one's chess regimen looks like this, it's
   not likely that much progress will be made with respect to
   visualizing:
   1. Occasional tournament chess
   2. Lots of blitz chess
   3. Opening study
   4. Some practice with basic tactics
   5. Replaying games on the computer
   The problem is that except for item 1, the remaining items are at best
   neutral and more likely harmful for visualization. In blitz, there's
   very little opportunity to look ahead in a more than trivial fashion,
   and the more one plays the less likely one is to calculate in such
   games. Opening study, as generally conducted, involves replaying some
   variations and trying to memorize them - no looking ahead there. Basic
   tactics are essentially to work on, both for those who are learning
   them and those who want to maintain sharpness, but again, they're not
   about calculating but working on pattern recognition. And finally,
   replaying games on a computer is often done as a passive exercise (to
   write oxymoronically). One need calculate ahead or even visualize the
   annotator's lines (or at least to play through them and then try to
   reconstruct the position at the start of the sideline) - the arrow
   keys will do all the work for us.
   So not only do we not cultivate our ability to visualize, we create
   habits that make us less disposed to achieve excellence in that area.
   And yet we find ourselves frustrated by our inability to visualize
   during our tournament games! Ok, what should we do about this? There
   are a few common-sense steps we can take, and I'll briefly mention
   them. One is to work on tactical puzzles that aren't trivial - buy
   tactics books with non-trivial puzzles ("non-triivality" is a relative
   term, of course) or solve endgame studies. Another technique was
   implicitly suggested above: try to follow the variations of an
   annotator in your mind, without moving pieces on a board or a screen.
   Those are pretty normal ideas; here's one that's a little less
   traditional: play blindfold chess. Normally that's not so easy to do -
   first, you have to find a willing partner; second, if you're doing
   this at the local club, you have to deal with the embarrassment of
   either seeming arrogant (especially if you win) or like a fool (if you
   lose). Happily, there's now a simple way to do it online with the
   latest batch of ChessBase engines (Fritz 11 and (Deep) Hiarcs 12,
   maybe some other one too) - you can read the how-to details [1]here.
   You can play blindfold both against the engine itself (whether on full
   blast or on a lobotomized setting) or online against other players.
   (I'd recommend starting with unrated games against lower-rated
   players, but be as ambitious as you like.) Not only will this help
   your visualization skills, but unless you're an old pro at blindfold
   play, it'll work wonders for your ability to concentrate as well. Give
   it a try, and after you've been at it for a while, let me know if it
   helped.
   * I've read somewhere that the stronger a player is, the less likely
   he or she is to have something like a pictorial representation of a
   chessboard when thinking about a position. (This would make for [2]an
   interesting survey, I think...help?)

References

   1. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=4722
   2. http://chessmind.powerblogs.com/posts/1215810829.shtml