Fighting Tunnel Vision

I won't claim that this drill is going to help everyone, and admittedly it is somewhat tedious. But I can tell you that it has helped me in my endless fight against tunnel vision.

First, let me define tunnel vision as it relates to my chess game. For me, tunnel vision is when I am literally seeing only four or maybe nine or sixteen squares of the board. I am so focused on what is happening in one single area of the board that I am completely ignoring what is happening on the rest of the board. I do see that he moved his Bishop, but I don't see the "Action Ranges" of that Bishop. I don't see that the Bishop is literally hitting my pawn on g2 and when he moves his Queen to the g-file, doom is impending.

Why does this happen to me? What am I doing that is causing this tunnel vision? There are a couple of causes, in my specific case...

1) I am so, so focused on trying to make an attack work in the upper left corner, that I am literally oblivious of what my opponent is doing. I am breaking one of the cardinal rules of chess, "Pay more attention to what he is up to, than what you are up to." 

2) I fail to look! My coach hammers me incessantly about this and she is absolutely right. I fail to "see" what is happening, because I "fail to look". This specific fault is the focus of this blog post.

Every book has some sort of way of saying "what the pieces can do." I prefer to use Reuben Fine's definition. He calls what the pieces can do, their "action ranges." The action ranges of the pieces are obviously just the places any piece can move. The Knight moves in an L, the Bishop on an X, the Rook on a cross, etc. 

This is an incredibly simple concept, right? This is first grade stuff. I lament to my coach constantly how frustrating it is to simply "not see" what is going on. Over time she devised, and I expanded upon, a drill to try to help with this malady. I'm happy to say that in my specific case it works well. Hopefully you can find some value in it as well.

The drill itself is quite simple. I use it in conjunction with my daily puzzles, due to my limited study time. If I had the time to do separate puzzles as well, I would do so in order to work on speed, but more important for me as of the writing of this post is expanding "board vision" and eliminating "tunnel vision".

Each time a new puzzle comes up, I start with the enemy Queen and using my mouse, literally trace every path she can take. I trace the path to the edges of the board, even if she cannot go that far because of a friendly piece in the way. (There might be a discovered attack, or something else available that I'm not seeing, right?) I then move to the Rooks, then Bishops, Knights, King and Pawns. After I have traced the paths of all the enemy pieces, I then trace the paths of my own pieces, again starting with the Queen. Importantly, after tracing the path of a piece, I try to visualize the shape that is formed by the action ranges of the piece. The Queen makes a starburst. The Rook makes a cross. The Bishop makes an X. I literally try to "see" the shape when I see the piece; as if the squares are colored as in the images below:

The above process easily takes 60 seconds and sometimes more. After tracing the action ranges and "seeing" the shapes, I move on to solving the puzzle. As you might expect, the solution often comes to me as I am tracing the action ranges. When this happens, I make a mental note, but continue the drill, forcing myself to finish all of the pieces on the board.

As you can imagine, this drill can be tedious. It took quite a few puzzles before it even became "comfortable" to do. It was truly a lot of work. At first, I was only able to do about 7 or 8 puzzles in 30 minutes, but now I'm up to about 15 on average. I limit this drill to a 30 minute session, mostly so I don't grow weary of it and quit doing it.

To reinforce what I am seeing when I do this drill, I often play against Bots, with the sole purpose of drilling "action ranges". I literally trace each and every path of all pieces on every move. The goal is not to win the game, but rather to engrain in myself to LOOK at the whole board. My hope is that eventually I will have drilled enough that any time I see a piece on the board, my brain automatically sees the full action range of that piece and every other piece as I scan the board.

I hope this idea is helpful to my fellow chess players! Please leave comments and/or questions.