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 A peculiar sensation...During the course of play I started to notice that the pieces stopped looking like the figurines on the board, but took on almost as a physical presence, their powers of movement. So a bishop started to look almost like an X-shape over the board, the Queen a star, the rook a +. The thing was uncanny, but at the same time exciting. I felt then that I was on the edge of some kind of breakthrough into a higher level of play. Unfortunately this began just as the amount of chess going down was petering out, leaving a chess desert for the next several months. Lacking reinforcement, the experience died away, and I've never since been able to replicate it. This is not the same thing as the experienced tacticians among us will have experienced of short-range combinations springing to mind in a split second as a single complete idea. I dare say the more experienced and accomplished the tactician, the deeper these flashes of insight go. It all comes from experience, of course: it takes no special talent. And that is why I recommend to developing players that they try sharp (tactical) opening lines and middle game play (endings too!). These 'leap to the eye' situations will occur with more accuracy and more frequency as your intuitive faculty develops with experience and exercise. But this other thing - the 'lines of force' sensation - was something else altogether. It's a bit like a static flight simulator, in which the illusion of motion obtained from the moving image, and your control over it, is so strong you feel you are indeed flying an aircraft. But while this is great for 5 minutes (after that I get motion sickness, which is a real pain and spoils the fun), the chess one feels that this could lead to really great things. At any rate, has anyone else had a similar experience? Did it persist? Were you able to maintain it? Cheers, Ion |
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Actually... But I digress. Isn't it fun to say that? No, it wasn't an experience induced by some exogenous factor. It was just an altered perception. Very hard to describe accurately, at that. And it wasn't as if the 'lines' were of equal strength. 'Irrelevant' lines were fainter than relevant ones. A rook might have a strong line running down a file, and hardly anything along the rank. The image was static in itself, but hinted at an inner dynamism of the pieces. I have ever since regretted its loss. I'm not sure I understand your experiments with brain waves and mentally moving pieces around. That sounds like a whole different gig. |
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living the insight what a tremendous and rare and privileged and enviable experience, that rush of insight. (Before making Any move, I push and press and search for insight, I insist on an insight into the position, it's the joy of finding treasure, a hope fanned into being from works like "The Chess Mind" by Liverpool master Gerald Abrahams, and from the games of Breyer and Réti.) When I began sensing the board as a force field with the pieces merely being markers, marking the force that they emanated, and the spot from which they emanated that force, my own playing did jump a level. Early writers like I think Emanuel Lasker and later probably Larry Evans do speak in terms of forces on the board, rather than pieces. In more concrete language, when he was designing the Soviet's first chess computer, Botvinnik described the value of a piece as a function of its target and its trajectory in getting there. For me, that was the most powerful single statement I ever encountered about chess. And it helped conquer my reluctance to sacrifice pieces, pieces which were useless in that they had no target -- and therefore, no operable force. |
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Edmund Scientific Co about 40 years ago(from NJ)offered this brain wave monitor.I bring it out on Halloween and act like a an insane asylum escapee carrying around this box that makes all kinds of strange sounds with some now fake wires attached to my head! |
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TA: That sounds like fun! I recall someone's recount of Alex Alekhine's record breaking blindfold exhibitionback in the 1930s or whenever. When asked how he did it, the great man replied that he saw the pieces as lines of force (or words to that effect). The director of the event, however, did relate that Alekhine wasn't always accurate. Every now and then he would announce a move that was a bad mistake. In repeating the move back to the GM, the DOP adopted the practice of doing so with an interrogative intonation, whereat Alekhine would rethink and find a better continuation. I was never much chop at blindfold play, myself. I wonder if it could have improved with this new way of seeing? I'll never know... tactical_abyss: your comments about alpha, beta and theta waves, and improved sleep, etc reminds me of the depths of concentration into which one could sink during a chess game. That was another phenomenon that showed a distinct improvement in my play. Trouble was, I could never enter such a state voluntarily - something else, like the realisation things aren't going well - had to trigger the 'deep thought' process. The thing was, the state was very like sleep, and being interrupted out of it very much like being violently woken up. It became obvious then why Chess Masters liked a quiet and still place to play - no distractions. |
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Makes theoretical sense to me!But again,this is different from your experience,but I thought i'd add my story to yours! |
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