Expert: Louis Lima - 8/31/2007

Question
There's so many books on chess but so little useful materials on chess visualization.  I like to think of the thought process as "calculate, visualize, and evaluate", so using this model there are books on finding candidate moves and evaluating positions, but nothing specifically devoted to visualization!  I found the website www.chessvisualization.com, but would like to know if you have any thoughts on this topic.  How can a person improve his chess visualization skillz???  Thanks in advance!


Answer
In my opinion there is a plethora of training ways and materials to help one visualize better over the board. Improving one's ability to visualize over the board encompasses a wide range of skills such as calculation, postional understanding, intuition, creativity and imagination, piece-placement, knowledge-application, pattern-recognition, etc. From that perspective the more you improve on these areas the more you will increase your chess visualization.

To me chess visualization meant being able to see "more". I don't have a concrete definition, but more along the lines of, say, being able to visualize a lot of knight moves in the middlegame. Antoher example is that I would sometimes miss a tactic because I would fail to bring a far-away piece into the action, or fail to consider a sweeping move across the board.

Last year I was doing some blindfold chess exercises in bed before going to sleep. I would put a knight on the center of the board and would move it (in my mind) in concentric circles (e.g. d4-e4, e5, d5, c5, c4, etc.), and do similar exercises with other pieces. Then ended up helping me carry a blindfold game of chess, but not sure if they helped my chess visualization.

There is a book by Andy Soltis called "The Inner Game of Chess" in which he discusses calculation and visualization. You may find some ideas there, as well as in the book "How to Think in Chess" I can't recall the author, but it is published by Chesscafe.com

One thing that is helping me a ton overall is Jonathan Rowston's idea of setting up a position over the board and focus for 20 minutes on trying to find the answer. It should be a position in which there is a lot of analysis by the author, that way you can compare your thoughts/notes to the author's answer/analysis. In this way you learn a lot about what you specifically need to learn and improve. He says that 20 minutes of this is easily worth 1 hour of study, and I am finding that out to be true.

Another thought that I had was that perhaps we need to investigate more how chess visualization can help our overall chess improvement. As I said earlier, chess visualization encompasses a wide range of skills. For instance, I just playing a game of speed chess a couple of weeks ago. I has Black and the game started as 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 g6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nc6 5.Be3 Bg7 - Here he played 6.f3? and it seemed like a very odd move to me, but I just went ahead and played te developing move 6..Nf6? - Here I failed to "visualize" the simple 6...Qb6! - In this situation, learning to be more aware of weaknesses (e.g. b2, the knight on d4, and the undefended bishop on e3) would have improve my ability to visualize Qb6. Queen visualization exercises over the board would not have helped me a bit with this example.

Warmly,
Louis