Visualization Training
One of the critical skills to help your calculation is the ability to visualize variations as you calculate. I never knew you could train this skill, I thought I would just try to play some blindfold games and hopefully, the visualization would naturally improve.
That was until I read this post on the Next Level Chess blog. It is a guest post by Aiden Rayner. In the post, he explains a method of training to improve your visualization.
This training method is based on the idea of “Isolate and Intensify”.
Isolating the skill would mean that we need to find a way to train only the visualization for itself, for example, if we play a blindfold game we are training visualization but also we have to calculate, evaluate the position, make plans, etc, so that a lot more going on than just visualization. Also if we train tactics (without moving the pieces on the board) we are still calculating and evaluating positions (hopefully).
Intensifying the skill basically means that the training needs to be harder than when we play.
So to really improve your visualization we need to find a way to train just visualization and to push the training way more than we would need in a game.
You should read the post to better understand the method, but in a nutshell, the training consists of:
Find an audio recording of a game or record the moves of a game in an audio file;
Listen to the audio and try to visualize the board;
At each move, try to see what is happening, what pieces are being attacked, and if there are pins in the position, which square pieces control;
If at any point you feel lost, then start over from the beginning;
do it for 10 to 15 minutes before every training session.
In the beginning, I could follow 4 to 5 moves, until a month ago I could follow 20 moves without a problem. I should say that the way I did it was with my eyes closed and visualizing a 2D board in my head.
About a month ago it was the week before a tournament and I tried to do something different and, in my head, easier. I tried the same visualization method but instead of visualizing the board in my head I had a board in front of me and I tried to visualize the moves on the board (from the starting position). What I thought would be an easier exercise turned out to be much harder, I couldn´t get from move 10 or 12 without making a mistake.
My head was less foggy but I would end up making more mistakes because with the board you actually see the pieces and sometimes I would forget that I already moved a piece.
Conclusion
I have seen my visualization and calculation improve massively because of this method and while now I’m training more with the physical board in front of me (without moving the pieces of course) to imitate an OTB game, I suggest that you try a combination of that and visualizing the board in your head.
Also for the recorded games, I recommend the Audio Chess Podcast on Spotify.
Resources:
The original blog post → https://nextlevelchess.blog/improve-your-visualization/
Audio Chess → https://open.spotify.com/show/2drPaqTDsSh5nipHyCHndb
Let me know what you think of this training method and if you have any other training method that worked for you let me know by leaving a comment.