It seems like a lot of good chess players are able to recall board positions with ease. I was at a chess club a few years back and one of the average rated players there (i think he said he was 1830) did a post-mortem with me following a game I just lost. I was astounded how he was able to recall not 1 but 3 different positions of our game. These were positions that were long forgotten in my mind, yet he conjured them up no problem.
I also saw a couple vids on Youtube of top ranked players (like Polgar, Kramnik) where they do the same thing, quickly return a board to a position many moves back and begin going through variations at incredible speeds (to me they're incredible). That they are able to remember such complex positions astounds me.
Are all good chess players like this? I guess it would make sense to have a good memory to play chess, but at the level I just described,.. well that seems like an ability that would take a person like myself years to develop 🙁
I've read the same thing over and over about this. Top chess players, when showed a board of random pieces, are no better at memorizing positions than anybody else.
What they are good at is recognizing patterns on the chess board from games. They recall what they were thinking, not what was actually on the board.
Like instead of thinking knight b4 pawn a3, they think "Okay there was a potential knight fork... but the knight was threatened by a bishop... but I had a queen guarding the knight" Just from that, you see, you get the positions of 5 or 6 pieces alone.
Plus, when they are playing a game, they sometimes study positions for a very long time. This would help them recall afterwards what transpired.
Of course, I don't pretend to know exactly what I am talking about, but this explaination seems to be pretty legit, as instead of assigning GMs superhuman powers of memory, you see that they were merely reconstructing their own logical chains.
I can usually remember games I've played, even blitz(if I really enjoyed the game)for one or two days after playing the game, however I remember the game as a sequence of moves, I find it difficult to remember a certain position from the games, I have to go over the moves of the game to reach the position that I want to reconstruct. After some time if I don't think about the game I can remember certain features of the game but not the game itself.
Also frequently top class players have already memorised a lot of GM games from the past. Therefore a game they have just played might go into move 20 just from memory. If the next move deviated from previously played games, it would hardly be any effort to know positions for the rest of the game (For a GM, that is, not for me. 🙂 ). Knowing the position of move 23, for example, wouldn't be much of a problem. As fewer peices are on the board, it becomes even easier.
I remember reading about it in one of Mero Laszlo's book (Mérő László in correct Hungarian spelling). The difference between levels of chess players is practically the number of patterns they remember and able to recall.
His books are translated to several languages.
http://www.answers.com/topic/l-szl-m-r
I read a very interesting article a few weeks ago about this. I am sorry I can't remember where it is because I really should have put it on my Bookmarks, it is very nice.
What transpired from the article, among other things, is that in this kind of positions great players can remember better the position because they do it in "chunks". For example they don't remember there was a pawn on f2, g2 and h2 with a king in g1. Instead they remember that White's King was in a standard castled position.
Or they remember that the pawns are in a standard Queen Gambit Accepted Position. Or that Black has a KIA structure, etc. This is why they are no better than us at remembering random positions.
Also from the article I was astonished to read that GMs actually calculate fewer moves than most players. This is because they can see much better when a move is poor, so they only calculate the move that matters instead of calculating 3 or 4 different moves. This was the main difference they found between expert players and GMs.
Gives you something to think about... I think it was Capablanca that said "I only calculate one move, but it is always the correct one". Guess he was pretty honest 🙂
But summarizing to the parent posted, they do not have superior memory than you (well, maybe they have, but that is not the reason why they remember so much better). What happens is that they already played a lot of games and they associate patterns in your game with others played before yours. So they are not remembering your game alone but 100 that they've done before yours with one or two different moves that gave your specific variation... I believe 🙂
