Chess is basically memory and pattern recognition. Grandmasters know multiple openings sometimes 20 moves deep. They can play half a game just on memory alone
People clown on Gotham for being a memer and click baiter (cause he is) and even if he can't hit GM, he's still a CRAZY talented player. He gets destroyed by Magnus or Hikaru but he makes most other every VERY good players look like chumps.
If it's the video I'm thinking of, the board he was shown didn't even have the pieces. Just anonymous black or white tiles that showed A piece was there but not which one.
This isnt even specific to chess. LeBron is known for his incredibly bball IQ. There are stories of him telling his opponents what play they were running when they forgot. His podcast that's deep into ball is just an exercise of him remember basically every bit of the game that happened and how he knew his opponent was going to do something based on something else they had done in games prior seasons behind.
Pattern recognition is an incredible skill that can be applied most of life, especially within your own.
He also did that but with checkers pieces. They showed him a fucking board with checkers pieces instead of the chess ones, meaning that he could only see the colour and positions and he still remembered them
There's a video of Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, then top 3 world playing against someone who is ~1400 elo... while being interviewed... while the chessboard is in his back.
He beat him 3 or 4 times in a row with ease, and on 2 or 3 times, he even spotted illegal moves the other guy did.
Parlor tricks are small, entertaining magic acts or visual illusions performed up close for a small group of people, usually in a living room or at a party.
Grandmasters don’t just know “multiple openings”. They know every opening. Maybe some bad ones will slip their mind. And they have hundreds to thousands of games memorized. The famous ones of course, but also ones they just found interesting.
It seems like torture. They’re either playing or studying others’ games all day every day. You memorize and memorize and learn and learn. Completely insane way to live imo.
Yeah I know lol, when that guy Sabastian Sawe broke the marathon world record I just scoffed because a car can totally do that faster than him, so who cares?
I was a counselor/chaperone for a chess camp at a college back in 2000. We had several highly ranked players there as coaches for the kids. It was simultaneously the most socially awkward and raucous camp I've been to. The kids watched Searching for Bobby Fisher every day and argued over game analysis while also avoiding the groups of girls from cheerleading camp.
The master-level staff and counselors spent the evenings bouncing between staff dorm rooms and drinking. 😆 One night, everyone randomly decided to go to live dinner theatre and we watched Phantom. Not the Andrew Lloyd Webber version, the version written by Yeston and Kopit. It was such a weird experience.
EVERY serious multi-day chess event that I've attended as a chaperone has had at least one insane night party. I arrived at one event early in the day to register and settle in my room. AS SOON AS I WALKED IN there was already a guy who was inviting people up to his room where he had a keg tapped. Then these same people get up and absolutely focus on their game the next day. I don't know how they did it.
Yeah, I'm no expert but from watching chess tournaments, the first 20 or so moves tend to be rehearsed like it's choreography (miss 1 step and get fucked). But once they do the opening song and dance, it's 'pure chess' from that point. It's pretty nuts to watch but that's expected when the people playing do it for a living.
This is absolutely not true at all. Some of the best grandmasters will purposefully make bizarre moves early to force the game out of theory/memorization quickly and make it a game of skill and calculation.
Openings are about memory, sure. Endgames can be benefitted by pattern recognition, sure, but the majority of a chess match, the middle game, has very little to do with either.
If you try playing it 'see how it goes' you fail (like me)
I'm thinking most chess players know all those "Queen's Farthing Opening" and "The Leprosy Gambit" and "Artakov's Checkmate" by heart and know when to use each one
Depends on the player, but most players with a “master” title porbably know every opening 5-6 moves deep, their favourites more and they know the general idea behind the openings.
Im nowhere near a title but i know 2 openings about 6-7 moves deep.
But a lot of the time i have to think on the spot but there are also “opening principles” which i follow then to get an okayish position
Doing thousands upon thousands of chess puzzles will gain you the pattern recognition.
It was such a rush when I started recognising a few patterns in games I played (I'm sub 1000 ELO so nothing special) that lead me to win. Didn't have to think ahead because the pattern was forcing.
Yea pretty much, tactical patterns are just recognizing them and openings is just memory. Sprinkle in some board awareness and calculation power and you can be decent at chess
There’s elementary school kids that can take you 20+ moves deep into theory. Kids are excelling so fast that rating is kind of hitting a wall similar to how credit scores do - one of the factors is how much time you’ve had to compete and they simply haven’t been alive long enough to gain the rating points yet even thought they perform at 2600+ ratings in tournaments.
My club does blitz night during school
Holidays, so there are also kids competing those nights.
Those kids are ruthless. Everyone fears them whey they come to play. In classical i can hold my own due to their impatience but in blitz theyre monsters.
Well, studies have shown that chess grandmasters don't actually have exceptional memory except for chess specifically, it's really more about practice and gaining familiarity with different types of positions - a deliberate process of gaining intuition. I'm personally a USCF Expert near NM with a 2600+ online rating, and I sometimes forget what I ate for breakfast but can also recall complete OTB games I've played.
This is pretty universal across any discipline. Take one of the best baseball batters in the world and have them get pitched to by a professional softball pitcher and they can't hit shit.
The muscle memory is so trained in on that one specific thing that it breaks down as soon as the parameters are changed.
I remember reading about an experiment where they showed chess grandmasters (IIRC) chessboards with pieces positioned in ways they'd never realistically achieve in an actual game of chess and the GMs were basically no better than any random person at remembering the positions. They have amazing chess gameplay memory, but you're right, not better memory in general.
To be clear, when people play blindfolded, they're having someone tell them the moves. "Pawn to E6" or whatever. It's not like they're playing without knowing what the other person is doing, they just can't look at the board. For high level players, this is basically just a party trick because they always have the board in their heads anyway.
Not really. It's just that when you've played enough games your brain stops tracking individual pieces and starts seeing the game as patterns of several pieces at once. So remembering those patterns is way easier than trying to track every piece separately. To a novice it seems impressive, but it's about training your brain to "chunk" board states more efficiently, not just raw memorization.
the reason he was able to remember the game was because he spoke the "language" of chess, the positional intricacies of one game to the the next can be quite similar ...
not so much remembering every single piece on the board.
source: 1600 on chess.com, i have NO idea what this is like.
but chess is nothing like a memory exercise. in fact it's more of an art, discounting the opening. it's literally impossible to go about chess treating it like a memory game
Yes, there have been studies that show grandmasters having elite visual and spatial memory, and almost all of them can easily recall board positions and long sequences of moves or whole games. They're able to visualize the outcomes of different moves and likely responses in a way the average player can't comprehend.
It really isn't, at least no more than any skill requires memory. In my opinion as an okay chess player (top 1% of active players, which people who are into chess know means fuck all) this is a frustrating misconception about the game.
Great players are able to remember games because they are meaningful to them and because they've seen similar things a thousand times. It's not because they have exceptional memory or because they've made an exceptional effort to memorise games.
It's like how you would probably know all the words to your top 20 favourite songs, without even thinking about it. If you heard another song that was mostly the same but with a few changes, you would recognise the differences and could repeat it back. Because you know the words and they mean something to you, any change is easily memorable.
Great chess is mostly about thinking. Opening repertoires are important, but great players are distinguished by their understanding of the game, not wrote learning of historical positions.
It js not just memory. Any decent player would beat you if you completely mixed up the starting position. The best players in the world are also the best players at fischer random (the variant where you switch the starting position). If it was only memory then you would expect the top players to be no better than another chess player with random opening positions.
Not defending what they said, because it’s not true, but also men are probably the ones talking about chess more often because there is a huge gender inequality. Women are if anything discouraged from playing. So I wouldn’t necessarily blame men for saying that, rather than it being a general misconception.
I agree that Chess has little to do with intelligence. It is a skill like anything else. If someone beats you, they are better than you at chess, nothing more.
I've felt this too. I dated a guy who was into chess and lent me a book about opening moves because he hoped I'd play with him. I really like board games, but I'm not interested in playing one where I have to memorize a bunch of strategies.
baseball is just a memory exercise of knowing how to throw a ball
chess players just know chess like they know the layout of their own house and town, they know which floorboards creak, which light belongs to which lightswitch, which window needs extra force to get open etc.
it's a game still but the big distinction that people don't understand is that humans won't just intuit good moves. if you have no formal training but you're "intelligent" by any standards, you'll still get pieced up by a dumbass that plays a few games a day.
I went to a special residential high school for kids who were good at math when I was younger. My first roommate was on the chess team. I thought I knew how to play chess. Turns out I knew how the pieces moved, but I did not know how to play chess.
Almost 30 years later I’ve decided to try to get good enough to consistently beat my 8 year old son, who took lessons for a couple of years and plays chess puzzles for fun. I’ve played around 400 or 500 games of rapid on Lichess in the last 5 or 6 weeks and I’m having tons of fun getting better. I’m finally at the point where I’m recognizing specific openings. I agree it feels like more broad pattern recognition than memorization, it engages the same part of my brain that plans my runout strategy shooting pool, just way more intensely.
i think what frustrates me about chess is that people attempt to explain the "knowledge" necessary for chess as different than how we would categorize the things necessary to just be good at games/strategy. ultimately games come down to learning a fresh language that allows us to compartmentalize different aspects of it to be successful. for example, someone who is absurdly good at pattern recognition will also develop more quickly as a batter in baseball. they learn the language to identify what works and then they remember it. fastball middle middle = home run isn't more or less complex than avoiding being scholar's mated.
I think people maybe frame it differently because it's so easy to single move blunder or otherwise wreck your game with a single mistake (and so difficult to consistently stop doing it.) I failed a rook and king checkmate the other day... and all I could think was "I literally practiced this procedure with my son probably 50 times when he was 6 lol."
One of the things I absolutely love about lichess is the ability to go through the game move by move afterward and see what the engine thinks the best move was, then following down that path instead of the one the game actually took. It's crazy how many games I think I was handily winning my position was actually garbage and I only won because of an opponent blunder. On the other side, it's just as crazy how the engine can heavily favor me the entire game and a single move just destroys all that work.
I was playing with my son on a travel board at brunch a few weeks ago. I was up a rook and a bishop... I moved my queen and he literally cackled and said "you're not going to like this" and forced me 6 moves into mate.
There are other games where winning can tip just as sharply because of a single play, but there aren't many games where it can be difficult to see the move until it's made, then completely obvious once it is. Maybe the difficult part will go down as I get better? It's weird, I feel like when I'm on I'll win a few games in a row and when I'm not on I cannot stop making game ending mistakes that are obvious the minute I make them.
I feel like almost all skills are a memory exercise.
I am competent and can do most things after watching a video except my memory is garbage. Can I do it again two weeks later? Maybe 50% of the time.
Play any sport at a high level and it's exactly the same thing.. chess is just a really obvious one because there's not exactly any real depth of technique for picking up a piece and putting it down somewhere else on the board and so that stuff comes to the forefront.
But if I'm facing off against someone the same size/strength/weight as me with similar reaction times etc? The whole thing becomes a chess game. You watch how they move, where they move, predict the technique they're going to use. When you get serious you know all the other top competitors and what they do and don't like to do, their strengths/weaknesses and you adjust your own approach to match all the while they are doing that to you.
Things like this are how guys like Wayne Gretzky, regarded as one of the top athletes of all time (often competing with Sir Donald Bradman for number one), did what he did despite not being particularly special from a physical point of view (to be clear this is when the baseline is "professional athlete"). He wasn't super big, he wasn't super fast, but what he could do was read the ice so fast and so well he knew what everybody was going to do before they did it then position himself accordingly.
When you can accurately predict what is going to happen next, it doesn't matter how good the other person is in any other regard... you become unbeatable. Chess takes that aspect and beyond the basics of "how to play" makes it the entire game. That's why computers have been better than humans for so long, they can just calculate every single possible move anybody could ever make and always pick their best option.
That's why I don't like it as a board game, you don't play chess - you study it. And I rather fool around with other area control games that also can play more than one opponent.
For high level it’s 99% memorization. Thats what actual pros will tell you too. Maybe you have a knack for it. Maybe that knack can see you have rapid success, but every single top player needs to study openings and review others’ games endlessly to improve at high levels.
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u/Satan_McCool 1d ago
Stories like this make me feel like chess is less of a game and more of a memory exercise.