Memorizing GM Games

I read a few articles that say a good way to improve in chess is to memorize entire GM games. That not only will it strengthen your memory, but once every move is in your head you will be better able to understand each player's game plan a little better because you'll be analyzing each move from a different perspective.

very true

I don't think this is a good idea.  Improving your memory is good and you can achieve this in many different ways.  The top GMs (2750+) are not really playing chess.  They are trying to surprise their opponent more.  If you look at a game with a 2600 player playing a 2200 player you will probably learn more if you are lower than 2200.  You can see why the 2600 player is doing better. 

Should you memorize these moves?  I would remember the mistakes to avoid them, but you don't need to memorize the whole game.  There are plenty of other things you can memorize in chess that will help you further along.  I find middle game positions both difficult and essential in understanding how to gain an advantage in the endgame.

You are better off taking annotated master games (both players 2200+) and covering up the moves. After each move, do your own analysis of the position. Then compare your move and your analysis to the analysis from the master annotations. When your move choice and analysis are different from the master's, go back and think about the position and try to determine how you could change your thinking to arrive at the same move choice as the master. That will be more beneficial than just memorizing master games.

Funny, I use to believe that memorizing Shakespearean Sonnets would make me a better poet...

So I'm not a very good poet? :(

Oh, I was looking for "Mesmerizing GM Games". Next thread over? Thanks....

You should prepare for a rap battle instead maybe.

there is more to chess than meets the eye...

I expend effort memorizing games, but even more effort understanding them. I have memorized dozens of GM games, although most I remember only for a few weeks. When I understand the moves of a game and play through it four or five times, the memory part is not much effort.

Naturally, I have written several blog posts about memorizing games and closely related exercises. See http://chessskill.blogspot.com/2012/03/memorizing-chess-games.html and the posts with the label "Game of the Week 2015".

I agree

This post, in particular, addresses the notion of memorizing games. http://chessskill.blogspot.com/2015/01/opening-considerations.html

I'll weigh in on Roman's side.

I believe in this one. I do this. I don't hold myself to memorizing the very last juice squeeze of the endgame, but the first 24-30 or so moves, yeah.

The main thing is you can't memorize that many moves without understanding them. You do it right and you see the exquisite dance two masters are performing. You don't get every tactical and positional nuance, but you get the main story. It makes a difference.

It's also a powerful exercise for building your strength at visualizing a chess board and subsequent moves played from a position. Much of chess is just weight lifting. The more you do it, the stronger you get.

I got this idea from a Bruce Pandolfini story he told about how early in his apprenticeship he set himself the challenge of memorizing all the games of a Russian Chess Championship. His rating took off after that.

I think it could be a good thing. I don't think I could do it though.

It's an excellent topic for discussion. I have been trying to learn Spanish, and the Foreign Services Institute (FSI) created a course back in the '60s, before I was born. It is legal to download for free now, and it helped. One of the thing they do is make you memorize conversations in Spanish and Englsih (also available in many other languages). It was designed to teach US diplomats, and I wonder what is used today. I think there are analogies between language learning and chess, and how to do each at certain ages.

I think that when a GM game is well memorized, and you can go through the moves on a board with great ease, you are bound to understand the moves better because you will have no trouble dissecting the heck out of the game you are studying. A lot of people would not care to make the effort to memorize an entire game to see if the idea has merit or not.

it was his soliloqies. To be or not to be...

I have no GM games memorized other than Morphy's Opera Game, although I did once memorize a nice game in the Petroff that David Pruess did a video on for this site. However, I memorize my own games. All of my best wins from my tournament games are memorized, because going over them is great before a tournament for both vision and morale. I also have a few of my tournament losses memorized if they were particularly instructive or memorable.

I don't honestly try that hard to memorize my own games- I just spend a lot of time analyzing them in postmortem so it tends to stick. I have a very good memory. Since I started playing tournament chess again in late 2013, I have played 105 games, and while I probably have only about 10-15 of those 105 games memorized, I remember the names of all 105 opponents, which color I was, the opening, their approximate rating, and the result of each game, as well as my score and pre/post ratings in each event. I don't really try to do it; it's just that I spend a lot of time looking over and analyzing my games, and having a good memory doesn't hurt.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely, more temperate

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

And summer's lease hath all to short a date... (etc, etc.)

I memorized Sonnet 18 because it's my wife's favorite. The sonnets I have tried to write really sucked! ;-)

Your wife has impeccable taste.