To play like a chess master, you need to learn how to forget

Have you ever wondered how chess masters are able to play so many games simultaneously? The answer is quite simple, they don’t. Instead they play each game one move at a time. Reading a board position from first sight is not difficult, even for novices, and it can cure several bad habits of beginner chess players.

Learning chess for the first time, the hardest part for me was checking to make sure that all of my pieces were safe or balanced before making a move. The cure for that, after I finally noticed the habit, was to forget previous moves and read each board position from zero.

This particular forgetful strategy could be considered a brain hack because it fixes a very primitive weakness of human rationality. The problem is called cache poisoning in computer terminology. The issue is that human brains don’t think as fast as we can remember things. So, to make ourselves more intellectually formidable, we store half-baked ideas and partial memories and hope that they will be used later. With chess, this becomes a weakness, due to the very sharp and contrarian nature of the movements.

The way that knights move on the board, or bishops slant, or rooks slide; none of these motions fit into a natural flow that untrained human’s can recognize and deal with appropriately. Chess confuses our natural instincts, particularly in the slight reconfigurations of the board after each opponent move. We start to hallucinate, “wait, I don’t remember the opponent’s piece being there”, “what! where did that come from”. These are natural responses to the way a beginner learns to play the game.

Trying to learn chess through natural play is like trying to fit a cylinder into a square hole. In this version the square hole turns out to be large enough, but it also leaves empty space at the corners. These dark corners of attention are where we meet cache poisoning and partial hallucinations. When you look back at the side of the board you weren’t paying attention to, things have changed, and now your pieces are in a weak position. This is a common mishap across many board games besides chess.

Cache poisoning is also one of the reasons that checklists in hospitals were such a huge breakthrough. Doctors, as undoubtably intelligent as they are, still make simple mistakes. Checking and rechecking the patient tag and birthday has stopped the occurrence of misdirected treatment. This simple change is sometimes lauded as the biggest breakthrough since Penicillin.

So if you find yourself deep in thought, just remember to check your edges occasionally, things might have changed despite your attention.