Chess (We think) is the earliest form of war game so it teaches you to plan and think strategically.
Memory training wise, a goal is always useful and speed cards etc are a way to make your PAO system instinctive. It is a way to practice using your memory systems as well.
I would love the time and money to be a Grandmaster at Chess and a Grandmaster of Memory.
I think it would be a very interesting party trick to be able to memorise a deck of cards in 40 seconds.
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Memory enthusiast also spend a lot of time using their memory skills for beneficial reasons. Some learn a new language, some learn coding, try to use them in school to pass exams, etc.
There are many, many ways to use memory techniques to improve yourself. I even saw a post by someone who used their memory palace for meditation.
Chess is purely recreational, memory techniques are not.
It is harder for mental calculation to be useful these days but there are some benefits.
Dyscalculia is on the rise in my country and learning to do mental calculations early can help students from becoming worse with numbers, which can make following an education easier because numbers are almost everywhere.
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Yes memory techniques are useful. Many including myself get valuable practical use out of it. But you donât need to be able to memorize 50 decks of cards. This is like training for the olympics in order to be able to do yard work without getting out of breath. The largest part of oneâs effort is devoted to recreational training,.
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That is a generalization though. The people who use memory techniques to learn for example a language have no necessity to memorize a deck of cards.
Memory techniques CAN be used for recreational purposes.
Itâs really the competitors who mainly spend their time on recreational activities like memorizing a deck of cards. But even they probably still possess the ability to learn, for example, a new language much much faster than the average person because they trained in word memorization.
The same memory palace you use to store a deck of cards can the next day be used to memorize an article or a paper, etc.
The usage of memory techniques in itself is not recreational. Itâs the thing you use it for that can be recreational.
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I donât use memory techniques for recreational purposes.
I am a medical student, and I use them for long-term memories. I have 2-year-old memories that I memorized with the De Loci technique. Like the roots of the phrenic nerve (C3-C5) with the Major system, or the anatomy of the heart, lungs etc. At this point I have thousands and thousands of Loci and recently I also used them to memorize vocabulary in other languages other than my own (portuguese) like italian, french, english etc. To be fair, Memory techniques are essential to my daily functioning.
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Having some knowledge of how computer chess engines tend to work, Iâm very skeptical that memory techniques would be particularly helpful.
The difficult part of chess is evaluating possible board positions. Even if you had a photographic memory (nobody does, but⌠if you did) it wouldnât help because there are too many possible future board states to consider. Computer chess programs use clever heuristics to prune the game tree and only explore relevant parts, but they still only descend a certain depth (âplyâ) down the tree because it grows exponentially, which is generally intractable.
Humans canât do this, even with perfect memory. Instead, chess players gradually build up a sort of heuristic chess machine in their heads that suggests certain moves and gives an intuition that guides their analysis of specific risks and opportunities.
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In Dr Lynne Kelleyâs 2 books Memory Code and Craft she is talking about memory as used by our pre-writing ancestors and long term multi generational memory so these techniques can be used for long term memory systems.
I do wonder if you could build a chess memory palace so as you are presented with the right choice every time.
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ââŚpresented with the right choice everytimeâ
I think the short answer is no, as there are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the visible universe
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Maybe however there are only so many right moves.
Replace âonly so manyâ with â68 nonillionâ and Iâd say youâre spot on.
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I once did a rough estimate: If you were to store all possible chess games on a HD with highly efficient encoding, youâd need a disk about the size of the Milky Way. Speed of light would be a serious limitation. It could take 100k yrs to get data from a distant region of the disk.
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LOL. Thatâs great.
you are aware an IQ of 135 is still gifted right? and far above the norm? most people overcompensate their IQ out of embarrassment and feeling it makes you less intelligent when It only shows one type of intelligence so I resent that part of the comment other than that it is true you can be an average jo and still be good at chess it is just unlikely because they donât find it as fun. this only applies to most, not all.
although chess has its uses as its a competition between two people who have to strategize and outwit the other person which can help you become a more strategic person.
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Human players use a different strategy from the traditional computer approach. Humans depend primarily on pattern recognition and calculate only to refine their intuition. A computer has to test every move, a strong player will look at the position and immediately decide which moves are relevant to this situation and only follow a few lines of variation - enough to reach another position which he finds acceptable. This means building a large mental library of tactical and strategic motifs. This is usually remembered in the form of board positions or whole games. It is estimated that a GM knows some 10,000 positions. And then there is a forest of opening variation to learn. Many can recall from memory every tournament game theyâve ever played. As Fischer himself said, chess players need a strong memory.
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I think you are both missing a basic point I am trying to make. There might be a lot of possible moves however there are only so many that are used.
There are 20 possible opening moves however only 8 of them are used by the first 500 openings anyone studies.
Also I have no idea how many games are studied however I bet a lot of them start with they used the ⌠opening.
What we actually want is a series of images from the point of view of white and black so you can use them for pattern recognition. I also bet you could divide the board into 4 so you would need even less storage.
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Simon Reinhardâs course is now in the works and is being listed on chessableâs publishing schedule. He is collaborating with James Altucher who is an accomplished author and also a chess master (among other things).
I have posted before about how I do not believe mnemonics have any practical use for competitive players, but I will certainly buy his course and go into it with an open mind to see what he came up with.
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Yes, the course is in the works. The teaching videos with James are recorded (editing left), as well as one of the âguest videosâ (talking with a chess personality about chess and memory), and I am currently in the process of recording the remaining videos: those that feature me explaining things directly to the viewer.
With regards to usefulness of memory techniques for competitive players: among the students who have taken my chess memory course were, up this date, four titled players: two IMs and two 2600+ GMs. All were very much in favor of the method and said they feel it makes it much easier to remember complex opening files, but also endgames and basically all chess info. 
(testimonials on my website).
The same applies for the non-titled (but still very motivated and ambitious) chess amateurs who have taken the course.
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Yeah I canât do anything. I wish I was smart but I canât do it. I love the enthusiasm but none of this mattes when are we ever going to use this it just fluff
Stupid
Iâm stupid sorry typo
James seems kind of like a mini-Rex Sinquefield (billionaire chess sponsor). A big chess spender with his money from company equity sales.
He also has donated hundreds of subs to the Chess Dojo a group adult improver Twitch. One of the Chess Dojo senseiâs GM Jesse Kraai (who also happens to be #94 in my major system) is his coach and Jesse doesnât really offer lessons and is likely hundreds of dollars an hour.
Jesse is always chastising James on his youtube channel for trying to study brute force opening memorization wins.