Pennsylvania Keystones Chess Team

Crosstable League Standings Contests Tidbits Captain Tournament Director

The Pennsylvania Keystones are currently involved in the 12th annual Team Championship sponsored by the C.C.L.A. This website was built in the hope that it serves as a hub of communication between players resulting in better team performance. Team members are encouraged to send in personal profiles, game scores, annotations, comments on previously submitted annotations or anything else they feel the team would benefit from (or just plain enjoy). I can envision (but cannot promise on behalf of others) that the submitted annotations could prompt comments from the higher boards, potentially improving the play of all the lower rated boards.

In order to keep crosstables current don't forget to report your results. That's right, even the losses! Remember, we are a team. As such, nobody will harrass you for losing. I even lost a game once myself :-0

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Tidbits

Some Ideas for chessboard visualization

Now I am positively awful at playing blindfold chess; in fact, some would swear I'm playing my correspondence games that way! Yet acquiring the ability to visualize sections of the board in your mind and keep them updated as the pieces move will improve your ability to calculate during a normal game. Much like swinging 3 bats together before you get to the plate makes the one bat you do swing feel that much lighter. So says Andrew Soltis, George Koltanowski and no doubt many others. Over the years I've come up with a few ideas of my own that may be helpful to anyone who would like to improve in this area.

Think of the chessboard as best you can right now. If there are any square colors you know right off the bat, write them down. If you play the Caro-Kann you can probably recall that c6 is a light square. QGD players might remember that e7 is a dark square where the bishop develops in order to break the pin; and that c8 is a light square which houses that problem bishop. Take a minute now and try to collect as many of these mental anchor squares as you can. Don't think too long, because unless it comes to you fairly quickly, we don't want to classify it as an anchor square. You may have to 'learn' the square before it can serve that function. If you can't find any anchor squares, then aren't you lucky you stumbled onto this artice! If you can find some, then take note of what files they're in. You may be in good shape for the first step below.

I'm a big believer in mnemonics, so I recall the family names by noting that the letters a-c-e-g rhyme. Secondly they spell "ASEG" - not a word, but a hell of a lot closer to one then the other family is. For the b-d-f-h family, you're on your own. Personally, I think of the psychologist B.F. Skinner and the writer D.H. Lawrence. Hopefully, you will find a better mnemonic for yourself. Thankfully, you won't have to do these kinds of things for very long. You will get to know the families fairly quickly and then you'll be finished with this step.

Going back, suppose that when we tried to collect our mental anchor squares we found that we knew 7 of them pretty quickly. Lets say 4 of them were in the c file and 3 of them were in the d file. If we finsihed memorizing the colors of the squares in each of these two files, we would then have an anchor file in each family and we would be all set.

Once you know the colors of the squares in an anchor file, any other square that belongs to a file in that family has the same color per rank. If it doesn't belong to a file in that family, then it has the opposite color per rank. So in much the same way as we earlier talked about collecting anchor squares in a file, now we progress to having anchor files in a family.

So assume for a second that the h6 square was NOT one of your anchors and you had to figure out what color it was. You would do this by recalling two things: (1) The h file is in the family b-d-f-h. (2) I know that d6 is dark because d is my anchor file in that family, so therefore h6 must be dark.

Thanks to our family concept, we now know that a square in one family (b4 for example) will have the opposite color of a square on the same rank in the other family (c4 for example). But where else does this it-must-be-the-opposite-color concept apply? In two other places:

Incidently, two squares touching diagonally have to be the same color. If you doubt this, ask any bishop.

I would suggest learning in the following order. Study each of the concepts below until you can perform it instantly. Don't jump backward or forward until you can do the one you are on in your sleep. Remember: each step is a building block for the next; if you try to walk on one before the cement is dry you will get your shoes messed up. Get the picture?

If you have a tabletop chess computer, you can try playing a game with no pieces. Just record the moves on paper, so you have a trail to fall back on. Also, you can start by keeping the computer's pieces on and taking yours off.

Take your favorite game and try to visualize the moves until you lose track. For me it is Morphy's opera game. Since I've seen it so many times, I feel I have a 'leg up' on visualizing it. This is fine - cheating is allowed! When you reach a point in the game where things start to get fuzzy (like for me after 1. e4), go back and do it over. Only play the game to that point and repeat it. So the length of your game will increase as your ablity to visualize increases.

And finally, I remeber reading in an Andrew Soltis book on calculation where he said "Never try to envision the entire board at once, nobody does that - not even grandmasters!".

At last! I can do what they can do.

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last updated: 02/02/2002