Chessboard Vision — Part 1

Chessboard Vision VS Chess Visualization

Easy to confuse but NOT the same thing

With board vision, you focus on the present position on the board. With visualization, you’re considering a future position after a sequence of moves. Both are essential, but how do you improve each of these skills? It makes the most sense to me to start with board vision. If you’re not fully grasping all the possibilities you can see right before your eyes, how will you “know” what the CCTs (checks, captures, and threats) are after several moves?

Board Vision

GM Robert Ramirez explains and provides exercise examples in Chess lesson # 10: Board vision | Exercises to stop making beginner mistakes. This is one of his 70 free chess lessons grouped in 7 levels of 10 lessons each.

He states that board vision comes before basic tactics. In the first few exercises, he asks the viewer to count all the legal moves the White pieces can play using the position he provides. He then provides the answer. You can repeat this for all the Black pieces. I tried these exercises several times several months apart, and I never got any of them right.

At about 5:45 minutes into the video, he introduces a highly beneficial exercise. You place a random piece on a random square on an empty board, then count all the squares it can reach. Pay attention to the difference in the number of squares from a corner square versus from a center square…