❓ Lists of Piece Locations (Q&A)

Hi, it's Aiden. Welcome to another episode of the Saturday QA here on the chest visualization with Don't Move podcast. One day, one day I will make an intro for this and I'll change the intro for the other episodes. Uh but it is not this day. I will. At some point. Surely, I promise. For those who don't know, this episode is a weekly episode we do where I answer questions from all of you.

Uh sent to me through email or comments in the Don't Move membership system or wherever else you can leave questions. uh and I try and answer them basically as a way to help you all connect some of the theory uh and practice that you're doing in uh these episodes here on the podcast with particular practical individual situations and questions.

I figure if one of you is asking me a question, there's probably many of you that have the same question. Uh so if you have questions of your own, please do not hesitate to reach out Aiden at don't move until you see.it. And I would absolutely love to hear from you. There's also a contact form on the site. Uh don't move until you see dot it if you want to reach out. Uh there. Today's question comes from Jeff.

James says, Hi Aiden. I've noticed that I'm able to play games blindfolded, but for certain exercises on the site, I really struggle. It's the exercises when you read the piece locations out and then have to solve for the game. I feel very overloaded and I often forget most of the locations. I try to relax, but my brain can't seem to hold it all, so I just end up forgetting most of the locations. If I listen to it like four times I can do it, but I want to be able to do it first listening.

Have you got any suggestions for this? Great site, by the way, J. Cool. Uh so fantastic question, James. I'm sure lots of people have this same question, the same concern. Uh what he's referring to here are exercises like the position exercise or the lost piece exercise that uh come up here regularly on the podcast. So you would have experienced some of these. Are the ones where I list peace locations?

And then you need to identify some detail. It might be the best move or it might be a missing piece, something like that. James's concern uh is that when he tries to engage with these exercises, he feels overloaded very quickly. His working memory can't seem to hold it all in one hit, and it takes a lot of repetition and uh

And effort to build that position in his mind. And then he's also saying that he struggles because he feels he has to listen to the audio four times before he's really got a sense of that.

So those are the two parts of the question. Uh I'm gonna address them separately. The first I'm gonna talk about the listening to it four times piece. Now The the position exercises and the lost peace exercises are sort of different uh in their own way in sort of versus the other sorts of exercises you'll find here on the system.

And it's the reason they're different is they require you to build an in-progress position. You don't get a sense from a starting position of of moves that play out. You have to start from somewhere in the middle of a game. However, because audio is audio, I have to communicate to one piece location at a time. And each of our brains, depending on how our brain works, depending on our natural conceptualization model, how our brain wants to represent this information to us.

It's going to prioritize different bits of the position. For some people, the position doesn't make any sense until they understand where the kings are and what's happening around the king.

For other people, the position doesn't make any sense until they have a full sense of the pawn structure for both sides. They can slot the other pieces around and For some people, the position doesn't make sense until they know where their really powerful pieces are and what they're doing, like the queens and the rooks.

The problem with an audio format, there's lots of massive pluses for the sorts of work we do here with an audio format, but with this is there's no way that I can tailor the audio to give you the information. in the right order for everybody's brain. Simply too many different uh ways our brains want to handle it. It's impossible. What this means though is that for pretty much everybody, it takes at least two listens to get through an even slightly complex position exercise or a lost piece.

The reason for this, and I'm sure many of you have felt this yourself, is the first time you're listening through it, even if you're trying to remember everything, your brain is going to latch onto particular details. At the end of that first listen through, you'll find you remember some things quite well and other things not very well at all.

Chances are those things you remember quite well are things that are important to your brain as like a baseline, a foundation for the rest of the position. If those foundations don't come first, then you're not the the other details that you've been hearing aren't going to be layered on top of that foundation.

So your first listen is just building that foundation. What does your brain need? Could be porn structure, it could be whatever, but what does your brain need? Build that foundation. A second listen is coloring it. This is even at master level, it takes at least two listens for anything that's a seemingly complex position. If it's a very complex position with masters, it can take three or four.

As we're building our own conceptualization strength, it's gonna start off with several listens probably, and maybe come back, especially for the simpler exercises. But it's probably not Ever gonna get consistently to one listen only. And that's just because of the order your brain wishes it could receive that information. And there's no way I can do that for everybody. So take that pressure off of it. Two listens is the minimum, pretty much.

Uh and the others is adding color, whatever else you need. The key part is clarity, not necessarily speed that you're taking all this in. If it takes four lessons, five less, six lessons, whatever, that's totally okay. You're trying to build clarity. You're working your working memory up to being able to handle that position and you're trying to understand what's happening in it. It doesn't matter how many times you need a reminder through that process. Your brain's doing the work.

So that's the second part. The first part is the process of feeling very overloaded and forgetting most of the Some of that is what we've already talked about with the kind of foundation that your brain wants in the position. But some of that is because of the nature of certain models and certain positions. So Uh, this is especially true for any verbal thinkers in the audience among you guys. A verbal thinker, big generalization, but tends to like sequences. Sequences and stories.

Verbal thinkers tend to be quite comfortable running from the start of a game, where with every move they can build up the story, build up the sequence of what This move happens, it creates these new ripples in the story. The opponent responds with this other move, creating new ripples in the story, and the story branches off from there.

When presented with a position without any of that context, It can be quite difficult to remember where everything is because you haven't got the story underlined. This is especially true for strongly verbal thinkers, but it can happen in the middle of the spectrum. It can happen with a little bit of visual people as well. It's for many people, it's just harder to build a sense of the relationship. In a position. if you don't see the context leading up to the

That's part of what the position exercise and the lost piece exercise are designed to do. They're designed to put pressure on your ability to understand. how a bunch of pieces go together. The sort of complex ways that pieces interact with each other and be able to identify that information and hold that information. So if position exercises are a struggle, there's and like basically holding all that information is a struggle because it's a lot of information. Here's a couple ways to go.

First, uh strangely, the more information you encode into every piece. The easier you're going to find holding it all. It seems Uh backwards it seems counterintuitive. But if you put lots of information into a piece, if you look at where that rook location is and you

think about okay, what what's along that rank, what's along that file, what's it attacking, what's it defending, what's it threatening, how's it related to the the past pawn on the other side of the board? How's it related to that bishop? How's it related to the king? Getting more and more information into each piece location and how it interacts with the rest of the board is actually way easier for our brain to hold.

Because we're creating lots of little links, lots of little connections between the things on the board, enabling our working memory to chunk those things more effectively. So that's the first piece. If you're struggling with it, try putting more information into every piece instead of tr just trying to remember that there's a pawn on E4 and there's a pawn on D five and there's whatever. Instead of trying to remember things individually.

Think of how everything's interacting and tie everything together into big meaningful chunks. The second thing that can be really useful, uh, which is related to the first thing, but it's good for verbal thinkers, is to try and identify the story of the position. sort of what's happening in a bigger way on the macro level. Kind of where who's ahead? Where's the threats? What's kind of where's the momentum of this position?

and use those kind of larger story ideas to tie in those peace relationships. So thinking about Maybe what could have happened in the lead up to this position might be a useful idea. But it's probably more useful to think like this rook is defending that pawn, that pawn is defending this other pawn, this other pawn is threatening. Uh to like allow the queen to checkmate that queen is currently under attack from a bishop and creating like a sequence and a story.

of the pieces in the position tying everything together. That's really the key with a position exercise is to train yourself to tie a position together. instead of trying to remember where each individual piece is and then trusting that huge load of disparate disconnected information to your working memory that's not really designed to hold.

So that's my uh answer for those questions, James. I hope that helps. I hope that helps anyone else. Who's got the same questions? Position exercises are notoriously difficult uh for a lot of people, mostly because of these reasons, without having that move-by-move context. of a position, a lot of our models find it harder to make sense of those positions. But we can build that context for ourselves. Um and it might take a few listens. It's gonna always take at least.

If you have a question of your own, please send it through to Aiden at don't moveuntyc.it. And if you're loving the podcast, please leave us a review, rate, like, whatever the thing is on your particular platform. Uh it helps out a ton. Um and uh thank you again for all the support and we'll see you back here tomorrow. Here's to the