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→Rankings in Chess
*FIDE Master ("CM")
*FIDE Master ("CM")
*Candidate Master ("CM")
*Candidate Master ("CM")
== Chess mastery and memory improvement ==
''See also:'' [[Chess mastery and memory improvement]]
In his article ''Memory and Chess'', Bill Wall wrote:
{{Cquote|Studies of [[chess]] players have confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions was one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player is.
To the average person, playing a game of chess without sight of the board represents an extremely difficult, if not impossible challenge for the memory. No other human memory feat can surpass the achievements of the best simultaneous blindfold players. Blindfold chess players need knowledge and experience, imagination, and memory. Masters who were tested in blindfold games were generally able to remember all the moves played in a sequence of blindfold games. Masters differed on whether they used visual or abstract imagery to represent the chess board. The majority of masters said that they used only an abstract representation, combined with sub vocalizations of previous moves, to mentally examine the board.
In 1881, an article called "Memory in Chess Playing," appeared in Scientific American. It stated that wonderful as are the feats of chess-players who can work out a game or a series of games without seeing the board, there is nothing really remarkable in them. When once mastered, the trick is not only fairly easy of performance, but the fact that the process is purely mental rather facilitates than impedes the action of the mind. To the "blindfold" chess player, there is present a mental picture of the board with the pieces in position. He can change the position of the men as easily as he can think, and after he has mastered the difficulty of fixing the mental picture, it is distinctly before him. As a rule, chess-players are mental-picture-readers, and can at pleasure call up any one of several pictures of boards as they last conceived them. The most difficult feat is to play two or three games simultaneously blindfold, the moves made by their opponents being told them in close sequence and their own moves being directed after all the reports of the proceedings of their opponents have been received. (source: Scientific American, Dec 10, 1881, Vol. 45, # 24, p. 378)
In 1893 and 1894, Alfred Binet (1857-1911) conducted perhaps the first psychological studies into chess. He investigated the cognitive facilities of chess masters who could play blindfold chess. He hypothesized that chess depends upon the phenomenological qualities of visual memory. He found that only chess masters were able to play chess successfully without seeing the board and intermediate players found it impossible to play a game of blindfold chess. Binet found that experience, imagination, and memories of abstract and concrete varieties were required in master chess.<ref>[http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/articles/memory_and_chess.htm#:~:text=The%20ability%20to%20recall%20a,the%20more%20than%2020%20pieces. ''Memory and Chess''] by Bill Wall</ref>}}
==See also==
==See also==