How many games do you know?

You may own 100s of chess books, but how many chess games can you replay (till the end) on a chessboard to show off your excellent memory?

Good for you. How do you learn then?

I couldn't replay any although I could recognise quite a lot.

Carlsen can remember 10,000 games from start to finish. He said so in an interview.

I can't replay any, but I may recognize a few.

I wonder when the time will come that I no longer remember 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 d6 3 d4 Bg4 4 dxe5 Bxf3 5 Qxf3 dxe5 6 Bc4 Nf6 7 Qb3 Qe7 8 Nc3 c6 9 Bg5 b5 10 Nxb5 cxb5 11 Bxb5+ Nbd7 12 0-0-0 Rd8 13 Rxd7 Rxd7 14 Rd1 Qd6 15 Bxd7+ Nxd7 16 Qb8+ Nxb8 17 Rd8#

That is a Morphy classic if I am not wrong.

Good point. I could have replayed that one. Also Reti-Tartakower where White sacrifices his Q on d8 and then forces mate with a double check. So maybe 2. Both of those are rather short though.

Yeah, well, as you can see, I goofed it up at first, leaving out 15 Bxd7+ Nxd7. I'll see if I can get Lasker-Thomas approximately right.

Oh yeah, that one. Maybe 3 then 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Well, something like that.

 There are many many must-know games for general ideas and themes but not sure of the practical value of having all of them memorised move by move all the way through to resignation?

I have 11 Morphy games memorized, but I'm pretty lazy about it. Since I can just look at a game once and memorize it, I should probably have hundreds of games memorized. I memorized those games in two days with 20 minutes a day spent memorizing five games (and then another 20 minutes playing over the games of the previous days, proving that I did in fact have them memorized) but on the third day I didn't do it and on the fourth day life got in the way.

This thread is inspiring to get back on it though.

And I would say playing through the games quickly to get the patterns in your head isn't good enough. If your brain just sees a pattern once in no context then it won't stay there. You should analyze the games and try to find improvements, which will lead to easy memorization of the game. Morphy games are easy to memorize because Morphy's moves are logical. Although I sometimes find myself getting tripped up on opponents moves. There is this one game (I can't recall the opening now because it's been three weeks) where I couldn't for the life of my remember the game because the opponent played a crazy "h5??" in the middle of the game which I had forgotten.

The Morphy game is one that I also remember. It's ...Qe6 there, though, not ...Qd6.

Yes, agree with you entirely Morphysrevenges, but the OP was asking about memorised games that you can replay out at will. For me at least, that's not many.

Personally, I find it astonishing that someone can remember dozens and dozens of games played by other players, move by move, which they remember seeing years ago. I can't even remember a single game I played myself. Not even a handful of connected moves, in fact, let alone an entire game.

It's a skill I would love to have and which I deeply admire.

You should easily be able to recall games right after you played them because you know why you made all your moves and why your opponent made at least most of his moves. if this isn't the case, you may need to trying a longer time control so that you can make moves that have more purpose behind them.

Thanks for the tip, I will certainly think hard about that.