bad edit , sorry
ability to visualize
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Dec 30, 2018
0
#3
ghost_of_pushwood wrote:
Since I don't see too many beginners reeling off lists of vars, I suspect it's a learned skill.
can you play blindfold chess ? can all players at your level do that ?
Dec 30, 2018
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#4
Visualization does not require playing a whole game blindfold. Visiualizing 3-5 ply is enough for nonprofessional players. It is followed by evaluation. If the position or material balance looks better or even, play the move.
Dec 30, 2018
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#5
http://chessvis.com/ I think they have a free iOS app
I have started using this (infrequently) and have noticed a tiny change
very curious how other people train visualisation, what works ? what to try first ? etc
Dec 30, 2018
0
#6
When I was new, I distinctly remember during one particular game I struggled to calculate ~2 moves ahead... and this was an opening position, less than 5 moves into the game (i.e. not anything complicated).
I'd get to 2 and lose track of where the pieces were and I'd have to start over. I'd have to calculate 3 or 4 times just to get it into my head whether it was safe to capture that pawn (guarded once, attacked twice).
Since then (more than 10 years later) I've solved puzzles that involved visualizing 10 moves (20 ply) and I've played games blindfolded.
There is some natural talent for it, obviously, because we have people like Gareyev who played 48 blindfold games at the same time... a feat which super GM Svidler called unimaginable.
And I knew a 1600 player who could play 4 blindfold games at once.
But you can also take heart because Gareyev is "only" a weak GM. And that guy who played 4 at once (now rated 2000) I once won a pawn off of him in a game due to a very simple tactic.
In other words extreme ability to visualize is not so important in chess... and a basic visualization ability is trainable. Honestly I don't feel like some GMs visualize any better than me... but the accuracy of their calculation is absurdly high, mostly because they automatically ignore bad moves and can very often render a correct evaluation at the end of calculating a short sequence.
Dec 30, 2018
0
#7
natarka wrote:
http://chessvis.com/ I think they have a free iOS app
I have started using this (infrequently) and have noticed a tiny change
very curious how other people train this , what works ? what to try first ? etc
I got better by playing (I guess that's obvious) and solving tactic puzzles the wrong way 
Well, I solved them the right way for visualization training, the wrong way for tactic training, although this was an accident (I had no idea what I was doing).
I got a book of puzzles. 1 stars were pretty easy, 2 stars were pretty hard for me (3 and 4 stars I couldn't solve).
https://www.amazon.com/Sharpen-Your-Tactics-Sacrifices-Combinations/dp/1880673134
So I'd spend 10-20 minutes on a 2 star puzzle, calculating non-stop, trying to find something that worked.
Doing that a few hours a day, every day for a few months noticeably made my visualization a lot better.
visualization is learnable imo however you can visualize a position and not notice important things about it *quickly* unless you work on pattern recognition by theme. so I think the latter is much more important to see actual results in live games. I would like to know the benefit of Mind Mirage on the Carlsen training app. I found that very tough.
Dec 30, 2018
0
#9
natarka wrote:
to what extent is the ability to visualize chess moves an inborn gift vs a trainable skill ?
I might be smart by some standards (ie. academic etc) but do not have a visual mind , I can't actually see anything in my mind or just some kind of mess , kind of , sort of.
if you have trained this skill I would be very interested to know how you went about it and what kind of progress was possible (ie. what you could see before vs what you could see after training)
I'm not great at visualization and I have an IQ, measured by Mensa, of 157. What I do is memorize tactical and positional patterns as much as possible. Then I do Tactics Trainer problems here and at chesstempo. When a solve or fail a problem, I go back and try to understand why it took me so long to see what I needed to do.
There are great books likecMartin Weteschnik's, Chess Tactics from Scratch, with not only examples, but principles behind how to create pins, discovered attacks, etc. Plenty of diagrams so you can follow in book alone.
I also review the motifs in the interactive pages below:
https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-tactics--definitions-and-examples
https://chesstempo.com/tactical-motifs.html
https://chesstempo.com/positional-motifs.html
to what extent is the ability to visualize chess moves an inborn gift vs a trainable skill ?
I might be smart by some standards (ie. academic etc) but do not have a visual mind , I can't actually see anything in my mind or just some kind of mess , kind of , sort of.
if you have trained this skill I would be very interested to know how you went about it and what kind of progress was possible (ie. what you could see before vs what you could see after training)