How do good chess players memorize positions so fast?

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Jillyb00

Every time I play in chess tournaments and I finish early or my teammates finish early , the better players I'm with and our coaches can easily recreate our positions and I can't even memorize how I played a while ago. What is the thinking process put into memorizing that many positions so fast?im so curious cause I guess I wanna be that good one day in memorizing positions just like that 

notmtwain
Jillyb00 wrote:

Every time I play in chess tournaments and I finish early or my teammates finish early , the better players I'm with and our coaches can easily recreate our positions and I can't even memorize how I played a while ago. What is the thinking process put into memorizing that many positions so fast?im so curious cause I guess I wanna be that good one day in memorizing positions just like that 

You must have good coaches. A strong memory is just a natural ability that some people possess.

Almost everyone can improve their memory somewhat through practice.

kindaspongey

I suspect that a lot of this has to do with the perception of various sorts of meaning in the arrangement of the pieces. Such perceptions help one to remember stuff. I think that there was some discussion of this in some chess psychology book - comparing memory of game positions with memory of totally random piece arrangements.

kindaspongey

I can remember this because I somewhat understand it.

Weevil99
Jillyb00 wrote:

Every time I play in chess tournaments and I finish early or my teammates finish early , the better players I'm with and our coaches can easily recreate our positions and I can't even memorize how I played a while ago. What is the thinking process put into memorizing that many positions so fast?im so curious cause I guess I wanna be that good one day in memorizing positions just like that 

It has nothing to do with the stronger players having better memory.  Their memory is no more likely to be exceptional than a random person off the street.  What they do have is a lot of experience with chess patterns.  They've played thousands of games, serious and casual, and they've looked at tens of thousands.  Certain patterns repeat themselves over and over and experienced players recognize them more quickly.  They remember a single "chunk", such as "White is castled kingside" and instantly they've placed 6 white pieces on the proper squares (3 pawns, the king, a rook, a knight).  A complete beginner might have to remember 6 separate chunks, one for each piece, and someone who had never seen the game would have to memorize 12, one for each piece and one for each square that piece was on.

 

Some very interesting experiments along these lines were conducted in the mid 1900s by a chess master and psychologist named de Groot.  He would set up a position from some master game and show the position to a player for a few seconds.  Then he would remove it from the player's sight and ask him to reconstruct it.  He did this with players ranging from strong grandmasters to novices.  Unsurprisingly, he found that there was a very strong correlation between chess strength and the ability to remember positions.  The GMs could correctly place 93% of the pieces.  Experts got 72%, and class players just 51%.

 

Later experimenters tried the same experiment but added a new stage.  They confirmed de Groot's work in normal chess positions, but when they tried placing pieces randomly on the board in ways that made no chess sense at all, the grandmasters did no better than the beginners.  They were all about the same.

 

It's not about being born with a freaky eidetic memory.  It's about having thousands of patterns burned into your brain, and that takes time, experience, and study.