Memorize Games or Positions

Hey guys.

I would be interested in your feedback. Whether it be master games or your own games, is it more efficient to memorize the full game itself, or specific positions (the critical moments)?

My idea is that while you are more immersed in the struggle trying to recite each and every move, you might go over more games by simply running through positions and remembering them.

Anyway, I don't think there is a right or wrong answer... feel free to share your thoughts.

It's not necessary to memorize the positions. Instead it's important to make decisions, and determine whether your decisions were better or worse than the "correct" decision (move played by GM in master games or computer in yours), not to mention WHY.

Memorizing the position will help you in that exact position- figuring out the defects in your thinking will help you in many.

Thanks for the advice, Jason. I like the idea, though I would rather not take the time to guess every single move in the game... so I wonder if a method like evaluating the position, plans, candidate moves, etc every ten moves would be a good place to start, because if I pick up a game to look through, I may not know in advance the critical positions where I should spend some extra study... anyway, good hearing from you.

If you analyze your own games shortly after you play them, you will probably remember what the critical decisions were.

The positions in which tactics can occur should be memorized. You should be able to describe, by name, every tactic and position on these interactive pages:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-tactics--definitions-and-examples

https://chesstempo.com/tactical-motifs.html

https://chesstempo.com/positional-motifs.html

The reason you want to know them by name is that it makes it easier to quickly retrieve the information from your brain and recognize key positions.

In a recent game, I had a bad position but saw that if I could tempt my opponent by giving away a piece, his King would be in a position to fall to the Dovetail Mate - where his own pieces block him from escape squares during a diagonal attack by my Queen.  I won the game that way.  Being able to recognize tactical possibilities is tremendously important.

The importance of games, in my opinion, is to show you what kinds of middlegame attacks you can attempt from the various openings.

I have my own technique of remembering positions which you may not "understand". It's an unusual way of remembering. 

Just go with the flow immersed in an activity & everything will be fine.

for me is memorizing patterns

Memorizing a full game, by itself, is not very useful. Actually, pure memorization is probably just a waste of time at best.

Analyzing a game, to the point where you understand the moves (at least on some level, obviously not as well as a GM) tends to also mean you've memorized the game... not because you were trying to, but like watching a two hour movie, you remember the plot without much effort if it makes sense.

Although that, of course, takes time.

So one thing you can do is memorize a game, then wait a few hours, or even a few days, then try to replicate it. If you can, move on to the next game. With this method you're not going to remember the game for very long, but having it in your memory for at least one play though tends to let a few ideas and patterns get into the long term memory. Doing this with a book like Fischer's 60 memorable games, or a collection of games from an opening you want to learn, is not a bad exercise (if you also take some notes and do some analysis).

Oh, and I'd say the same for a positions. Analysis is more useful than memorization. Even though the two are related, the focus shouldn't be on memorization.

I think you can get to expert-master level without studying master games at all. I'm 2050+ USCF and I have never studied one grandmaster game legitimately. Of course, I have done research on grandmaster games but mostly my strategy is to gain an advantage (physiological or statistical) in the opening so that I could have an easier middlegame. Of course, many of my rivals think that such a strategy is bound to fail but...just wait!

And of course, memorizing ideas in certain positions/pawn structures is a googol times better than memorizing exact positions. 

Thank you all for your answers!

Last night, I decided to set up a board and attempt to memorize Kasparov's Immortal Game. It took an hour, and I can pretty much recite the moves (though the move order may not be accurate, which I don't think matters very much).

I took a lot of notes, as well as every 10 moves or so, I guess what move Kasparov played and why, analyzed what he played and why it was better.

It took me one hour to sit down and memorize the game.

I personally enjoyed that experience, and look forward to many more in the future

And I'm using this game collection. Highly recommended. 

It's most important to realize the defect in your thinking in a critical position. What ChessicallyInclined said may be a lot of work...but it works

Nice list.

Randomly clicked one, this is my first time seeing this game (below)

I don't know how useful it would be to memorize (hah) but it's a lot of fun to look at and be confused by

 It's a relevant question.  I remember reading about Magnus Carlsen, and how you could show him a position, and he would tell you from what game (The players and the date or year) that that position came from.  

And he had some phenomenal number of games from which he could retrieve positions like that, like maybe 10,000 games.  Maybe even more.  

You could show Magnus a position, he'd look at it for a little while, and then he'd say something like, "Kramnik-Aronian, 2011, Sinquefield Cup."   It's a crazy genius chess memory.

Yeah.

I remember some 60 minutes interview or something, where they were going to "test" his memory by showing him a position and asking him to name the players... and they showed him one of his own games

Not much of a test for Carlsen.

Yeah. In fact, I was watching that documentary yesterday, which motivated me to memorize more games... he can memorize 10,000 famous chess games!

If you want to memorize games, I would suggest short games, such as miniatures.

Polgar has his book of 5000+ tactical problems, which most of us have probably seen.  It also includes 600 miniature games, all under 25 moves, all decided by a tactical combo.  The book organizes the games by which square the tactical combo starts (a sacrifice on f6, say), which is an interesting way to do it.

When I was a bit younger, I memorized a fair chunk of these games, about 50 or so (don't ask me to reproduce them now!).  The chief benefit: because all these games were quite short, the loser had to make a pretty big mistake, or a whole collection of smaller ones.  By going through so many of these games, I got pretty good at seeing early mistakes and, more importantly, knowing how to take advantage.

You don't need to memorize the games to get the benefit, but taking the effort to memorize them was useful: I reviewed the games many times, and I then mentally reviewed them every few days to make sure they were still in my head.  Repetition is the mother of all skill, so this constant reviewing made the lessons stick much more than if I had only looked at the game once.

And for a fun story: at our local chess club, which had only a handful of people, one day the head instructor had a series of puzzles.  One was taken from one of the games I had memorized, so I not only solved it instantly but was able to replay the game up until that point.  The looks of sheer awe I got were hilarious!  And that's likely as close as I'll ever get to being Magnus Carlsen.

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