TRAINING IN CHESS: A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH

This article is definitelly worth reading if you're a chess player willing to improve.

There's quite a few thing psychology discovered about chess player worth knowing:

1. Chess players have a highly efficient mode of (high-level) perception. They can access the key elements of a position rapidly.

2. Chess players show a remarkable memory for chess positions and games. This ability typically does not extend beyond chess.

3. Chess knowledge is encoded at several levels, in particular at a low, perceptual level, where patterns of pieces are stored, and at a high, conceptual level, where information about plans, evaluation, etc., is stored. These various types of encoding, with rich indexing and a high level of cross-referencing, account for chess players’ excellent professional memory.

4. Chess players search highly selectively. It is rare that they analyze more than one hundred positions in the search tree before choosing a move.

5. There is no difference between the search algorithm of class A players (Elo 1800-2000) and that of Grandmasters.

6. Masters lose relatively little of their skill when they play simultaneous games or speed chess.

The author revisit the training based on the scientific evidence collected and they also debunk a series of widelly spread myths.

The recomendations made by the authors can be summarized as follows:

• Teach from the simple to the complex
• Teach from the known to the unknown
• The elements to be learnt should be clearly identified
• Use an improving spiral, where you come back to the same concepts and ideas and add increasingly more complex new information
• Focus on a limited number of types of standard problem situations, and teach the various methods in these positions thoroughly
• Repetition is necessary. Go over the same material several times, using varying points of view and a wide range of examples
• Avoid spending too much time on historical and anecdotal details
• At the beginning, don’t encourage students to carry out their own analysis of well-known problem situations, as they do not possess the key concepts yet
• Encourage students to find a balance between rote learning and understanding
• Encourage students to keep information in a central filing system or a database
• The ability to look ahead possible moves is made possible by knowledge. Training this ability per se by exercises aiming at improving short-term memory or visualization (e.g. by playing blindfold chess) is not recommended