EXTRA CREDIT Random CHESS Post

In my last random post, I promised that I would talk about chess again, so here's that promise! I actually had to stop playing chess for a little bit because of midterms, but now I'm playing again and I think I've hit a slump. I've pretty much exhausted all of the opening and gambits on YouTube and I've been stuck at my rank for quite some time now, so I think I'll need to get a book to learn some really obscure and awesome strategies. Earlier this year, around March, I read a book by Bobby Fischer that went over some basic mating patterns and how to avoid setting yourself up in them and I was able to pretty much immediately see results after finishing the book. I'm not sure if it's because I was pretty at chess back then, but I was surprised by how much my rank improved. This time around, I don't think I'll improve as much as I did back then since I would reach the ranking level of masters after only reading 2 books, but hey fingers crossed. 

One thing I want to get out there about chess though, is that you don't actually have to be extremely intelligent to be good at chess. Contrary to popular belief, the best chess players don't actually rely on fluid intelligence (being able to think and adapt to new situations and come up with solutions). Good players actually rely heavily on crystalized intelligence (capacity to memorize). The best players simply have hundreds, or more likely, thousands of scenarios memorized. For each of those scenarios that they have memorized, they know the best move to use. When I first heard about the reliance on memorization, I was skeptical. But honestly, after playing for so long, I can safely say that this statement is true. One game I remember between Garry Kasparov and someone else (I can't remember his name) demonstrated this perfectly. In an interview following the match, Kasparov stated that he was surprised on move 26 because his opponent had deviated from Kasparov's recollection of how the game should have progressed. In other words, the game had progressed exactly according to how Kasparov recalled from memory, until the 26th move when his opponent made a blunder. Memorizing all of these combinations sounds challenging, but trust me, if you play chess a few hours a day everyday for years on end, you start to memorize patterns, consciously or subconsciously. I'm not saying I'm a great chess player either. I'm about the rank of the average competitive chess player. But now that I am ranked fairly well,  I can finally see how impactful crystallized intelligence is on your level of play.