Dr.

Patzer’s Chess Mnemonics Course

Dr. Patzer’s
Chess Mnemonics Course
1 Introduction to mnemonics
What if I told you…

 …that you can remember all your chess openings flawlessly and never forget them?
 …that you can learn 15-20 moves of a new opening in just 15 minutes?

This may sound incredible – impossible even! But I promise it is very much doable. And you
don’t need to be a genius or born with any special gifts. All you need is a systematic approach
to memorization.

How can I make such outrageous claims, you ask? The simple answer is: I have tried it myself. I
do not have any exceptional cognitive gifts, yet I have been able to improve my memory
immensely by using memory techniques, also known as mnemonics. I have memorized things
that would have been impossible without proper techniques. Here are some examples of
things I have memorized:

 100 digits of pi
 Two lines of the Grünfeld defense that I had never seen before, 18 moves deep
 The order of an entire deck of playing cards
 All the world chess champion matches, including years, names of players and of course
the winners

Ok, not the World’s most impressive feats of memory. But what if I told you I spent about 10-
15 minutes on each of them? Would that be more impressive? I think so. And the good news is
you can do it too! All it takes is a bit of practice. My aim is to help you build up the tools you
need to do the same. Sound cool? Let’s get down to business!

1.1 Before we begin…

Let’s do a little experiment. Are you up for it? I want you to take a look at the numbers below
and try to remember them all. Take as much time as you need.

1592653589

Got it? Ok. Let’s do another one.

Close your eyes. Wait, no. That’s not going to work. You need to be able to read. Ok, keep your
eyes open and imagine, as vividly as you can, the following course of events:

You get home one evening, and someone has parked a wheel chair outside your front
door. Don’t ask me why, but you take a pencil and stab at one of the tires. The rubber is
hard, and you feel your hand bounce back slightly as the sharp point penetrates the tire.
You can hear the air seeping out, and you go inside.

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In your hall, you find a huge chess piece (a knight) with an even bigger lollipop stuck to its
head. Apparently, someone with a big mouth was tired of the lollipop and simply stuck it
on there.

Puzzled by the things you’ve seen so far, you shake your head and go into your kitchen.
And you find yet another wheel-chair with a guitar laying on the seat. There is sand and
tire marks and on the floor. You should probably clean it up, but that can wait for now.
You grab a beverage from the refrigerator and move to the living room to relax for a
moment.

In your couch, you see yet another strange sight: A seagull sitting in a wheel chair. How
weird is that! What on earth is a seagull doing in your living room? And why is it in a
wheel chair? And why are there so many wheel chairs around?? The seagull screams at
you, and you decide to just call it a night and go to bed.

You find your bedroom door is blocked by something. You push the door open and knock
over a huge hour glass that falls on top of another huge lollipop. Both of them break, and
the room is full of a mixture of glass, sand and crushed candy. With every step you take
out of the room, you can feel something breaking under your feet, and there is a smell of
synthetic fruit in the air. You give up and decide to spend the night at a nearby hotel.

A strange story? Yes, quite bizarre. And you may ask why I have asked you to read such a
ridiculous story. We will get back to that later. For now, I can just promise you that everything
will make sense at the end of this chapter.

1.2 Inside your brilliant mind

There are many myths about memory and learning styles. Of course, some people have a
stronger natural memory and ability to learn compared to others. However, I claim that
everyone has a good memory, and everyone has the ability to learn anything, as long as they
don’t have any kind of cognitive disability. Now, you may object to this claim, thinking that:

 “I always forget where I put my car keys”

 “I am horrible at remembering names”
 “I always forget the things I need to remember when I take my exams”

You can probably fill in a few more examples of things you say to yourself, or that you’ve heard
from other people. And although you may have many such factors that suggest you may have
a bad memory, that is probably not the source of your problems.

Before we get into those sources, let’s just quickly take a look at how your mind works when
you take in new information.

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Learning/
memorization

Impressions
.
.
.
Working Short-term Long-term
.
memory memory memory
.
.
.
.

Recall

Figure 1 The process of learning and recall

The figure above is an attempt at illustrating the process of learning/memorization and recall.
We are constantly bombarded with impressions of different kinds; images, sounds, sensory
information and other information that we somehow need to take care of. Some parts are
filtered out, some are processed consciously or subconsciously. The information we actively
process is stored temporarily in our short-term memories. Now here is the pickle: If you do
nothing with the information that has reached your short-term memory, it will be lost. And the
problem is that the capacity of our short-term memory is limited, usually to between 5 and 7
pieces of information. So if you want to keep a shopping list in your short term memory (for
instance by repeating them loudly to yourself), you will have a hard time remembering more
than 7 items. And that is where our long-term memory comes in. Here, we can store a virtually
unlimited amount of information. This is where all our memories and facts are stored. If you
try to enumerate everything you can remember, you will soon realize the enormous capacity
of our long-term memory.

So the challenge of memorization is getting the information past the short-term memory and
into your long-term memory. Getting information from short-term memory to long-term
memory requires some sort of further processing and repetition. Now let’s get back to the
reasons reason why we do not remember the things we want to. I claim that this boils down to
two main sources:

1. You don’t pay proper attention

2. You are not engaging the right parts of your brain

Let’s illustrate this with a couple of examples. For instance, when meeting new people, our
minds are often occupied with thoughts about what we are going to say ourselves rather than
what the person opposite us are saying. We shake hands (at least before corona was an issue)
and say our names. And just as quickly as we have introduced ourselves, the other person’s
name is gone. This is not due to poor memory, but rather lack of attention; the information
only enters our short-term memory (at best) and is not processed further into our long-term
memory. So technically, you didn’t forget the name, you never remembered it in the first
place! We can increase the probability of remembering their name if we wait for the other
person to speak, listen to what they say, repeat their name and perhaps even ask about the
pronunciation. Maybe you even know someone else with the same name. The more you

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interact with the name (or other information), the easier it will be for you to get it into your
long-term memory.

But how about other things that you actually try to remember. For instance, a phone number,
the formula for solving quadratic equations, the famous monologue from Hamlet, or a certain
chess opening. I argue that you can remember anything (!) you want. It is just a question of
proper technique. Now we are approaching the meat of this dish, namely techniques for
memorization or mnemonics.

1.3 Mnemonics in general

Mnemonics is a term to indicate a number of different techniques that can be used to enhance
memorization. We are generally bad at remembering abstract information, such as numbers,
names and chess moves. However, our minds are truly great when it comes to stories, images
and things that are out of the ordinary. And this is what I mean by engaging the right parts of
your mind. If you want to remember something, you should make sure you convert the
information to a format that your brain is good at handling.

All kinds of mnemonics make use of these things; you take a piece of information that you
want to remember, and you use associations to turn it into a story, something visual,
something bizarre or, optimally, a combination of them: A visual and strange story, like the one
in the beginning of the chapter.

Tony Buzan, one of the first grandmasters of memory (that’s right, you can become a GM in
memory) lists twelve such techniques that can be used for making information more
memorable:

1. Senses 7. Numbers
2. Motion 8. Symbols
3. Association 9. Color
4. Sexuality 10. Sequence
5. Humor 11. Positive imagery
6. Imagination 12. Exaggeration

But making things memorable is not enough. As stated above, memorization requires
repetition. Many chess fans will be familiar with the term spaced repetition from Chessable.
This is not something that they have made up, but rather it is a principle that has been
discovered and verified through research on memory and recall. Several studies have shown
that you can maintain information in your long-term memory by spacing out the repetitions
(hence the term). Whenever you are learning something that you want to remember, you
should repeat it with gradually longer intervals, as illustrated below.

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100 %

75 %

50 %

25 %

0%
1h 1 day 1 week 1 month

Figure 2 The ”forgetfulness curve”

As illustrated by the diagram above, any information that you acquire will gradually fade over
time (light blue). If you follow this curve to the right, you will see that you forget more than 50
% of the information after just a few hours. After one month, most of the information will have
faded out of memory. However, by repeating the information about 1 hour after the initial
study, you will prolong the retention period (dark blue). Then you repeat after about 1 week
(green), 1 month (orange) and 3 months (yellow). For each repetition, the amount of
information you forget will successively decrease.

After the initial period illustrated above, you only need to refresh your memory about once
per year, and you will remember it indefinitely. Of course, these time intervals are not written
in stone, but the principle is that you “space out” the repetitions more and more for each
repetition. If you forget too much, simply repeat more frequently.

1.4 Mnemonics in chess

You shouldn’t memorize openings, you should understand the moves and the main plans. This
is an advice that is often proffered in the chess community. However, if you ask any
grandmaster, they will most likely be able to recite the first 15-20 moves of all major openings
directly from memory. Of course, they also understand the openings, but memory is still a very
important part of their opening knowledge. Still, if you ask masters about opening knowledge,
they will tell you that you need to understand the openings. In the book Secrets of a
Grandpatzer, Kenneth Mark Colby puts it this way:

Masters tell you not to memorize openings but to understand them. You need
both. To paraphrase what Mark Twain said about thunder and lightning:
understanding is good, understanding is impressive, but it is memory that
does the work. (…) One of the worst pieces of advice repeatedly offered to
patzers is ‘Don’t memorize’. Ridiculous! You must memorize certain things.
(…) If you know the opening by heart for ten moves, you have a great jump in
time and energy over your opponent. You will still be comfortable in what for
you is an opening whereas your opponent may be struggling on his own
resources in his positional middle game. (p. 35-36)

Whether or not you agree with Colby on this statement, knowing your openings by heart will
help you get better positions and thereby probably improve your results as well.

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Of course, understanding is our long-term goal, but sometimes we just want to make sure we
avoid positional (or tactical) blunders in the first few moves.

Another benefit of knowing the book moves by heart is that you will immediately know when
your opponent deviates from theory and get a hint to look for tactics. Let’s look at an example
from one of my recent games. I was White and knew my opponent likes the Grünfeld, so I had
looked up a few lines before the game and memorized them.

1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5 4. cxd5 Nxd5 5. e4 Nxc3 6. bxc3 Bg7 7. Bg5 O-O 8. Nf3 c5 9. Rc1
Bg4 10. d5 Qa5

White to play

Since I had memorized the opening, I knew that the move suggested by Watson was 10…f5.
We often hear that nobody will whisper in your ear “White to play and win” during a game.
But this is fairly close. Knowing that my opponent had deviated from theory, this was a signal
for me to look for tactics. It almost feels like cheating.

1.5 Your first mnemonics framework

Finally, let’s get back to the introduction. I will ask you to do two more challenges. First,
without looking, try to list all the numbers I asked you to memorize. Write them down or say
them to yourself. Don’t look up the answers quite yet.

For the second challenge, try to remember the strange story you read. I want you to
remember the ten objects that were described in the story, in the order they appear. To
clarify, an object on top of another comes first, and an object that does something to another
object will come first. So for instance a hammer hitting a nail will be; 1. hammer, 2. nail. Got it?
Ok, go.

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Now, take a look at the images below. Each image represents a number. Just looking at the
shape, I am sure you can figure out which image corresponds to which number.

Figure 3 Images for memorizing numbers

With the help of the images above, you should now be able to convert the objects from the
weird story to a sequence of numbers.

LOCATION OBJECTS NUMBERS

Front door Pencil, Wheel chair 1, 5
Hall Lollipop, Chess knight 9, 2
Kitchen Guitar, Wheel chair 6, 5
Living room Seagull, Wheel chair 3, 5
Bedroom Hour glass, Lollipop 8, 9

Now to the point. If you’ve done everything correct, you should have two identical number
sequences, namely the following:

1592653589

So basically, I have asked you to memorize the same information in two different ways. How
did you do? Which technique gave the best result? How many times did you repeat the
numbers to yourself? And how many times did you repeat the story? Most likely, remembering
the story and the images was easier than just memorizing the numbers straight.

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1.6 Summary and conclusion

Now you have learned your first mnemonic techniques. We have actually used a combination
of two techniques. The conversion of numbers to objects is sometimes called the number-
shape method or a peg system. Using your home to keep track of the sequence of the
information is a method known as a memory palace or the method of loci. We will get back to
both of these techniques in the upcoming parts of this course, and expand on them both.

But what about the numbers? Do they have any meaning? Yes, they do. These are actually the
first ten digits of pi, after the initial 3.14. I assume that you already know that pi=3.14, so if you
add the ten numbers we’ve memorized, you are now able to list the first twelve digits without
breaking a sweat.

3.141592653589

This information is of very little practical use, although you might be able to impress some
people. But you can use the method to memorize other types of numbers, such as phone
numbers, bank account numbers, IP-addresses or whatever you may find useful. And, you
actually have everything you need to memorize chess openings! I’ll let you ponder how to do
this, and we’ll get back to that topic later in the course, and also refine our methods.

1.7 Further reading

Tony Buzan (2010) The memory book – how to remember anything you want, Educational
Publishers

Gary Small (2002) The memory bible. An innovative strategy for keeping your brain young,
Hyperion

Memory techniques wiki [www], Grandmaster of memory,

https://artofmemory.com/wiki/International_Grand_Master_of_Memory

Bill Wall [www] Memory and chess,

http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/articles/memory_and_chess.htm