Too much and not enough

Polishing an opening repertoire is essential for top chess players, who must have variations prepared to meet all the standard openings. Those may be selected on grounds of stylistic appeal or rarity, hoping to catch an opponent off-guard. There are standard responses in turn, and a well-prepared player will have counter-ideas locked and loaded. Vast trees of chess analysis are stored in databases on their laptops and swapped over the internet. If you have money, you can buy books or online courses in which grandmasters share their ideas. If you have time, you can turn on a powerful chess engine (such as Stockfish) and craft your own.

The problem is that putting it on your computer is not the same as putting it between your ears. Chess players are like children at a buffet: we see all that mouth-watering knowledge and pile it high, only to find that such heaps of data can never be digested.

Recalling half of a variation is more dangerous than knowing nothing at all. If you forget some nuance in a complex situation, or muddle it with a subtly different position, the consequences can be calamitous.

In my experience, mnemonic tricks are of little use. The facts one wants to remember are abstract and complex, and an active player’s repertoire is constantly changing, like the proverbial Ship of Theseus. There is no substitute for understanding each move and rehearsing it often. Alas, there are few economies of scale in this process, because even superficially similar positions can demand a different move.

Most memory lapses happen deep into a variation, but I have also known them to come disconcertingly early. More than once, I have followed an opening line which had already occurred several times in my own games, only for my mind to draw a blank.

When it happens, some players sink into thought, striving to piece together the fragments that remain in their memory.