First Shipment
"King Lear with a touch of Don Quixote. His life combined tragedy and drama. Patches of glory and matching periods of suffering were sprinkled with doughty battles, sometimes against imaginary targets." - Ken Whyld (speaking about William Steinitz)
Got my first shipment in today. It included "William Steinitz, Chess Champion" and "Pawn Structure Chess". I bought the first book because I wanted to learn more about my favorite player and the second book will be a bookshelf paper-weight until I am good enough to make use of it.
7 Comments:
Yes, I have a book about hanging pawns. I'm afraid an awful lot of time will pass by before I have the feeling that I am ready for it.
A much stronger player than I instructed me to memorize the games when you go through a book. Only move on to the next section/game when you can replay the current game and its variations from memory. You don't have to retain it forever, but the ideas will stick better in your memory. I did this last year with Pachman's Modern Chess Strategy. It took me 6 months to go through the book, but I feel I have the concepts of basic positional play down pat. After all, that's basically what we're doing with tactics puzzles. You're ingraining the ideas behind the combinations in your long-term memory....
That's great advice CD. Most of the people who write chess articles advocate the very same thing. I am going through 64 Of the Most Instructive Games book currently, but the books I have on Steinitz also has some of his greatest games.
PS
Somewhere on the web (I don't know where anymore) I found a guy who had an interesting way of memorizing games. His idea was as follows: while learning you use the short term memory (STM).
In STM you can store only 6 to 12 items for ca. 45 seconds. So he annotated the game, and every 5th move he had something special. Mostly a diagram with interesting or funny texts which were easy to remember. So when you memorize a game you do it blocks of 5 moves and the diagram. The diagrams work as a sort of hat-rack. I used this system too and it worked remarkably well.
That's a pretty good mnemonic trick, Tempo. I didn't do that when I was going through Modern Chess Strategy, but I did notice that my mind developed certain memory triggers simply based on the plans and battles that were occurring on the board at the time.
Hey Tempo, that's a terrific idea! I'm going to use that going forward.
PS
Tempo, that's a very interesting technique. Do you play the moves out on computer program? Or do you do it over the board and draw out a diagram?
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