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Cognitive Chess: Improving Visualization and Calculation Skills
When You Are Serious about Improving...
To improve and succeed, a chessplayer must be able calculate precisely and visualize prospective positions. This is easier said than done. While pondering the next move, a chessplayer frequently keeps “replaying” the same melody in his mind, thus falling into a kind of trance.
This book by Russian grandmaster Konstantin Chernyshov is designed to improve your visualization and calculation skills. With 500 exercises and an additional 250 puzzles, the author provides a vast amount of material to work through for students and coaches of the game. Most exercises require the reader to go through several stages of thought, including visualizing the configuration of the pieces, evaluating the resulting positions, and finally, calculating an accurate continuation.
The regimen suggested by the author will require a disciplined approach by serious chessplayers. The exercises and puzzles start out with easy examples, but they gradually become more difficult. And all are meant to be solved without sight of the board.
As noted by Ian Harris in his
" Cognitive Chess is designed to train you to visualize the board and correctly calculate sequences in your mind, skills that are essential to problem solving in all phases of the game. Players who train in these areas will certainly see an overall improvement in their game. After all, chess is ultimately a contest between opponents to determine who can “out-calculate” the other."
Cognitive When you are serious about taking your game to the next level...
To improve and succeed, a chessplayer must be able calculate precisely and visualize prospective positions. This is easier said than done. While pondering the next move, a chessplayer frequently keeps “replaying” the same melody in his mind, thus falling into a kind of trance.
This book by Russian grandmaster Konstantin Chernyshov is designed to improve your visualization and calculation skills. With 500 exercises and an additional 250 puzzles, the author provides a vast amount of material to work through for students and coaches of the game. Most exercises require the reader to go through several stages of thought, including visualizing the configuration of the pieces, evaluating the resulting positions, and finally, calculating an accurate continuation.
The regimen suggested by the author will require a disciplined approach by serious chessplayers. The exercises and puzzles start out with easy examples, but they gradually become more difficult. And all are meant to be solved without sight of the board.
As noted by Ian Harris in his
" Cognitive Chess is designed to train you to visualize the board and correctly calculate sequences in your mind, skills that are essential to problem solving in all phases of the game. Players who train in these areas will certainly see an overall improvement in their game. After all, chess is ultimately a contest between opponents to determine who can “out-calculate” the other."
Cognitive When you are serious about taking your game to the next level...
- GenresChess
312 pages, Paperback
Published January 15, 2022
28 people are currently reading
66 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 21, 2023
Not for 95% of human beings!
Basically the book feels that the royal road to chess improvement is visualization skills, and, I guess through that your calculating ability.
I feel that's akin to memorizing the multiplication table and then figuring out how to multiply later on!
Basically Chernyshov and to a very mild extent Lev Alburt thought visulization is a great thing to even teach early on.... and it helps 'direct' how one calculates too.
And even Ian Harris who was like one of half a dozen authors of the 80s Pergamon book Mastering Chess (mostly designed by Danny Kopec), believes in the Kool-Aide too.
---
Here are some underwhelming quotes from the book
"A key skill players must develop is calculation. To calculate well, you must be able to visualize long and short continuations, while also keeping track of the changes taking place. Of course, this must all be done before a single move can be made. That is the focus of this one-of-a-kind book by Russian grandmaster Konstanin Chernyshov."
"Cognitive Chess is designed to train you to visualize the board and correctly calculate sequences in your mind, skills that are essential to problem solving in all phases of the game."
"Players who train in these areas will certainly see an overall improvement in their game. After all, chess is ultimately a contest between opponents to determine who can out-calculate the other."
"Often, when solving a problem, the temptation is to rely on your instincts and make a move without giving it the proper amount of thought. As any chess coach will confirm, it is a frequent challenge to get students to calculate variations in sufficient depth. When all is said and done, it is a difficult task to do well. Visualization is an important skill that needs to be practiced and developed over time if it is to be mastered."
"With 500 visualization exercises and 250 puzzles, Chernyshov provides a vast amount of material to work through for students of the game."
"Most exercises require the reader to go through several stages of thought, including visualizing the configuration of the pieces, evaluating the resulting positions, and finally, calculating an accurate continuation."
"With the exercises arranged in order from relatively simply to extremely difficult, this work will appeal to chess players of all levels."
"As recommended by the author, the reader will see the most benefit from solving all the puzzles without the use of a board and set. This can be no easy task even for experienced players. Some exercises may feel overwheming or frustrating. however it is the process of attempting to solve difficult puzzles that will provide remarkable value to the reader."
---
"While analyzing his creative chess, it turned out that he kept falling short of time unnecessarily and much too often, a habit which may well turn into chronic time pressure. Of course, in principle, this problem may be minimized to a substantial degree. However, the same problem in the games of children had me thinking about the reasons for this phenomenon."
"By untangling the logical loop, we managed to determine a common pattern on the early stage of juniors preparation that, over the course of time, leads to problems in calculation of variations. A child's vision of the board is inferior!"
"Surprisingly, those experienced first category players (and sometimes even candidate masters) were unable to determine colors of squares without looking at the board, and indicating the positions of pieces after several moves was already a truly unsolvable problem for them."
"It became clear that in the initial stage when a trainer has just begun to teach a young player, he had not paid proper attention to this little thing called 'vision of the board."
"With time, the technique of pawn and piece movements gets overshadowed in a chessplayer's brain with other important questions of preparation, but difficulties with board vision remain. Even worse, inconspicuously there forms the fear that during calculation of variations errors would be surely made. And that means that you have to recheck a variation once again - and probably more than once."
"In a modern chess game that is strictly limited by a tight time control, such an inadmissible luxury in managing the minutes of your time may well turn out to be disastrous... All that meant is it was necessary to suggest means of improving the situation. So, drawing on the achievements of the chess psychology, we took to it!"
---
gag me with a spoon
If you have a book of chess problems, fine.
But if you think that you want to write a book of chess problems where they twist your arm to basically visualize everything, and using the chessboard occasionally, but 'only' as a last resort.....
Screw that!
This book thinks visual memorization the Holy Grail to calculate
So it's for memorization wing-nuts only....
I think you should just slowly struggle at calculation, and yeah, some rare masters can gain 'sight of board'
I tend to think it's a virtually impossible and difficult task for Candidate Masters to do!
As well as Beginners.....
so is this book really necessary?
I think you can save more time, more effort, and save a lot of tears by just not 'doing' things the extremely difficult way....
but if you can already visualize the chess board, and play most of a chess game blindfold already, then this book, will be 'useful'.
---
Just buy 7 books on tactics, from easy to medium-hard
and don't look back
All I need to memorize is Joan Rivers Credit Card Number.....
---
The Author: Most exercises require the reader to go through several stages of thought, including visualizing the configuration of the pieces, evaluating the resulting positions, and finally, calculating an accurate continuation.
Me: Evaluate the position, with all the tactical nightmares and complexities. Done.
Basically the book feels that the royal road to chess improvement is visualization skills, and, I guess through that your calculating ability.
I feel that's akin to memorizing the multiplication table and then figuring out how to multiply later on!
Basically Chernyshov and to a very mild extent Lev Alburt thought visulization is a great thing to even teach early on.... and it helps 'direct' how one calculates too.
And even Ian Harris who was like one of half a dozen authors of the 80s Pergamon book Mastering Chess (mostly designed by Danny Kopec), believes in the Kool-Aide too.
---
Here are some underwhelming quotes from the book
"A key skill players must develop is calculation. To calculate well, you must be able to visualize long and short continuations, while also keeping track of the changes taking place. Of course, this must all be done before a single move can be made. That is the focus of this one-of-a-kind book by Russian grandmaster Konstanin Chernyshov."
"Cognitive Chess is designed to train you to visualize the board and correctly calculate sequences in your mind, skills that are essential to problem solving in all phases of the game."
"Players who train in these areas will certainly see an overall improvement in their game. After all, chess is ultimately a contest between opponents to determine who can out-calculate the other."
"Often, when solving a problem, the temptation is to rely on your instincts and make a move without giving it the proper amount of thought. As any chess coach will confirm, it is a frequent challenge to get students to calculate variations in sufficient depth. When all is said and done, it is a difficult task to do well. Visualization is an important skill that needs to be practiced and developed over time if it is to be mastered."
"With 500 visualization exercises and 250 puzzles, Chernyshov provides a vast amount of material to work through for students of the game."
"Most exercises require the reader to go through several stages of thought, including visualizing the configuration of the pieces, evaluating the resulting positions, and finally, calculating an accurate continuation."
"With the exercises arranged in order from relatively simply to extremely difficult, this work will appeal to chess players of all levels."
"As recommended by the author, the reader will see the most benefit from solving all the puzzles without the use of a board and set. This can be no easy task even for experienced players. Some exercises may feel overwheming or frustrating. however it is the process of attempting to solve difficult puzzles that will provide remarkable value to the reader."
---
"While analyzing his creative chess, it turned out that he kept falling short of time unnecessarily and much too often, a habit which may well turn into chronic time pressure. Of course, in principle, this problem may be minimized to a substantial degree. However, the same problem in the games of children had me thinking about the reasons for this phenomenon."
"By untangling the logical loop, we managed to determine a common pattern on the early stage of juniors preparation that, over the course of time, leads to problems in calculation of variations. A child's vision of the board is inferior!"
"Surprisingly, those experienced first category players (and sometimes even candidate masters) were unable to determine colors of squares without looking at the board, and indicating the positions of pieces after several moves was already a truly unsolvable problem for them."
"It became clear that in the initial stage when a trainer has just begun to teach a young player, he had not paid proper attention to this little thing called 'vision of the board."
"With time, the technique of pawn and piece movements gets overshadowed in a chessplayer's brain with other important questions of preparation, but difficulties with board vision remain. Even worse, inconspicuously there forms the fear that during calculation of variations errors would be surely made. And that means that you have to recheck a variation once again - and probably more than once."
"In a modern chess game that is strictly limited by a tight time control, such an inadmissible luxury in managing the minutes of your time may well turn out to be disastrous... All that meant is it was necessary to suggest means of improving the situation. So, drawing on the achievements of the chess psychology, we took to it!"
---
gag me with a spoon
If you have a book of chess problems, fine.
But if you think that you want to write a book of chess problems where they twist your arm to basically visualize everything, and using the chessboard occasionally, but 'only' as a last resort.....
Screw that!
This book thinks visual memorization the Holy Grail to calculate
So it's for memorization wing-nuts only....
I think you should just slowly struggle at calculation, and yeah, some rare masters can gain 'sight of board'
I tend to think it's a virtually impossible and difficult task for Candidate Masters to do!
As well as Beginners.....
so is this book really necessary?
I think you can save more time, more effort, and save a lot of tears by just not 'doing' things the extremely difficult way....
but if you can already visualize the chess board, and play most of a chess game blindfold already, then this book, will be 'useful'.
---
Just buy 7 books on tactics, from easy to medium-hard
and don't look back
All I need to memorize is Joan Rivers Credit Card Number.....
---
The Author: Most exercises require the reader to go through several stages of thought, including visualizing the configuration of the pieces, evaluating the resulting positions, and finally, calculating an accurate continuation.
Me: Evaluate the position, with all the tactical nightmares and complexities. Done.
Displaying 1 of 1 review