The Open Amateur

Train your Chess Brain

Imagine the situation, you are of strong club strength and have read chess theory for years in a succession of books gathered at the latest chess tournament. You know theory better than some Grandmaster. You know your minority attacks, isolated pawns, colour complexes, outpost play. However put your mind to solving a tactical complex position but its a blank! Yes you just cant juggle all those variations, candidates are coming at you in every direction and you feel overwhelmed and of course you plum for the first variation that seems half reasonable and 'intuition' tells you its OK.

Well the brain training specifically tailored for your chess thought is here. In the list below each type of thought is listed and the appropriate brain game to exercise those muscles.

i) Chess Variation Analysis - Systematically working your way through variations and evaluating each variation.

Sokobhan - a game that requires you to move blocks, one block at a time, in one step moves in a grid to a storage point. It helps you work through long variations systematically a wrong move can result in failure with no solution possible.

ii) Memorising Chess Evaluations - Each line analysed will have at least one or more evaluations at various nodes. Being able to memorise these evaluations is critical to being able to find strong moves.

Kakuro - a game which is a hybrid between sudoku and crosswords. It involves populating a grid with numbers using the totals on vertical and horizontals to work out the numbers in the grids.

iii) Visualising chess positions - This is a fuzzy area of chess thought where abstract visual 'chunks' are used handle chess analysis. This is known as chunking where patterns are recognised and memorised and speed analysis.

Block Logic (or bloxorz) - a game where a 3D block can be rolled along a 2-D grid and has to be orientated into a finishing square. The aims is to do this in the fewest moves without losing the block over the side of the 2-D grid. The difficulty increases and exercises your powers of visualisation.


These games are all available for purchase on smartphones and symbian devices (just try a google search). Which means you can exercise your brain with exercises which will improve your chess thinking without so much as moving a chess piece!!

Check out the links to try out the games online.

http://www.game-sokoban.com/
http://www.dokakuro.com/
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/bloxorz

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