What do you think is the best thing a player can do to improve board vision and calculating skills?
The killer app for improvement is to play more tournament games and annotate your games afterwards. That has been the one thread of common advice I’ve seen across years of master interviews.
Tactics and counting the amount of force (your three pieces to the opponents’ two, etc.) on a square is basic to calculation. Check Chess Tempo or Chess Tactics Server for a few of the long-standing free resources.
Aside from NM Pandolfini, NM Dan Heisman is one of the best beginner teachers in the USA right now. Many of his ChessCafe articles are available free in the Archives. NM Heisman is also a fan of Jeff Coakley for learning board vision in his book recommendations.
Board vision is extremely important, and it remains very important as a differentiator of ability as one improves. In my opinion, the difference between GMs and everyone else, including IMs (the next lower title) is that GMs have consistently better and less error-prone board vision. I have seen many games decided between GMs and IMs because of this, in fact it seems it’s usually the reason the GM wins.
I recommend solving tactical puzzles, make sure you can do mate-in-1 easily, then mate-in-2 and 3, other tactical puzzles, etc. Endgames are good because they teach patterns (that also appear in the middlegame) and also give a sense of the space of the board. For me, the reliability of my vision is greatly helped by knowing the characteristics of the board – how close is a square to the corner, light and dark squares, etc. It’s probably the same reason that musical performers learn the theory of scales and harmony, even though hypothetically all they have to do is reproduce the dots on the page faithfully.
When you can, start solving these problems without moving the pieces, which might be easiest with endgames. You can also solve them right from the diagram online or in a book, which saves you a lot of time and distraction setting things up. It’s much easier to read CL when you don’t need to set up the games! This was really important years ago when CL was not online with diagrams where the pieces moved around the board. I remember one day as a kid I was sick in bed and feeling very tired, reading CL or a chess book, and I did not even want to sit up and move the pieces, so I “cheated” and just tried to follow the games in my head. I never went back. You can do this without getting the flu first, though.
At a certain point you’ll be able to play a game in your head “blindfold”, without looking at the pieces at all. I’d guess that’s somewhere around 1800 rating or maybe much earlier. If can see the board situation pretty well, you won’t be fooled when three moves into a variation that you are analyzing during a game, several important pieces are in different positions or been captured, files have opened or closed, pins have disappeared, etc. compared to the position you see on the board.
There are also some simple “tricks” to adopt to increase board vision. The brain processes what it sees; what you want to do is to raise your sight level to that of inspection. (This is analogical to the idea that listening is different from hearing, the former involving more active attention and processing.)
You can help improve subconcious processing by changing your visual perspective. Have you ever noticed how you can walk up to a friend’s game, view it from the side, and instantly see a tactic that you may have normally missed in your own game? There is a line of thought that by providing the brain opportunities to view the board from different angles, that different lines of force between pieces will be highlighted and additional ideas will occur to you as a result.
So, try these:
- Sometimes stand behind your chair, or to the side of the board. If you can do so without annoying your opponent, viewing the board from the opposite side may also be helpful.
- Kneel on your chair at times, or do other things to change your height relative to the board. Get a bird’s-eye view
- Viewing from lower angles can accent files. Tilting your body slightly to the left or right can accent diagonals.
Another key is learn to follow the lines of force THROUGH pieces. Think of a Rook as a cannon. A measely piece in the way is no more likely to stop a threat than a wood frame wall would stop a howitzer. Don’t terminate lines of force at a piece, follow them across the board.
Hope these things help.
Kids in particular tend to see only part of a board. Practice seeing the entire board is key for them.
Young children have great difficulty seeing the whole board. They tend to focus on small chunks of 4 to 9 squares and miss long moves by bishops and rooks. This is sometimes true for adult beginners, but they usually spend more time looking at the boards than kids and can compensate.
With kids in the age range 4 to 6, it can often be helpful to use smaller analysis boards and pieces. Larger boards tend to overload their perception. The pieces are like a forest of distractions. Using smaller boards allows them to take in everything. When they get just a little older and more experienced they gradually adapt to using bigger boards. My assumption is that their angle of sight is better by looking down more than through the pieces.
Often I will place a bishop on a long diagonal and ask the kids what they see. Some have said that the squares are highlighted in their minds. A few said the squares were raised up when looking at them. A couple have said that the squares seem larger with the bishop on them. A player rated 1800+ said that bishops on long diagonals seem brighter and that the diagonals were lit like neon lights when he closed his eyes.
In Chinese chess, the center line is called the “river”. I have had success teaching kids to treat pieces that cross the river, or even appear to want to cross, like crocodiles. Those threats have to be dealt with. When they put their crocodiles across the river they should be supported. The kids liked the extra imagery added to the abstraction. It is funny, but one of my books has a conversation by Tal where he compares attacking to hockey. You throw a piece near the king or sacrifice and follow it with other pieces into the King’s corner. The kids improved their visualization and attacking technique after reading this selection.