Pattern Recognition in Chess

For psychological analysis of chess thinking, you may want to
consult Abraham's 'The Chess Mind' and de Groot's 'Thought and
Choice in Chess'. Both are superb books. Abraham is English
barrister and chessmaster; de Groot is psychologist-chessmaster.

Originally posted by Chesswick
I've been spending more time reading the "lighter" aspects of chess lately (history, interesting games, etc. rather than deep analysis) and I must say it's given me a fresh perspective on the game.

In particular, The Immortal Game (a good read) talks a little about the psychological aspects of chess. That's nothing new. He also talks about various stu ...[text shortened]... on the minutiae like "Does this opening give me a 0.0000000001 pawn advantage??"

The question is, how does one obtain the positions from which recognizeable patterns exist, and do so while maintaining positional solidity? The answer must be the combination of positional AND tactical elements. Hardly surprising to chess professionals, and yet chess amateurs habitually talk about tactics vs. positional play -- as if the two were contrasting rather than necessarily complementary aspects of chess.

And!.....players like me constantly forget to try and get to these positions...

I study checkmates otb and i do very well.


Yet when i play i never remember to try and create these winning mating attacks.

Tactics rarely just happen....you have to create them.

Now if i could only remember this...😞

Originally posted by Chesswick
I've been spending more time reading the "lighter" aspects of chess lately (history, interesting games, etc. rather than deep analysis) and I must say it's given me a fresh perspective on the game.

In particular, The Immortal Game (a good read) talks a little about the psychological aspects of chess. That's nothing new. He also talks about various stu on the minutiae like "Does this opening give me a 0.0000000001 pawn advantage??"

I just thought of a nice metaphor, (it has probably been stated a hundred times, it's not important), it's just like learning a language. you have to just subconsciously internalize the grammar and a large database of vocabulary, and the connecting of words by hearing and reading a lot. remember, a person who knows a language fairly well never thinks about it's grammar rules anymore, he just does it subconciously, and this corresponds to patern-recognition based simple tactical training.

however, to be good at a language, you just have to learn to create very long sentences, paragraphs, even articles, which is really very different. and this corresponds to (I think) deep calculation training. in a chess game, you write long articles, consisting of many grammer rules and vocabulary which you shouldn't have to think about, but you still have to calculate long variations.