Before we do anything else, take out your stopwatch. Utilizing the accompanying position, I need you to produce two numbers as quick as you can and record your time:

1) How many legal moves does White have?
2) What number of those legitimate moves checkmate Black? Prepared, go…

The solution is almost as beautiful as the puzzle presented here. White has 29 legal moves and all of them lead to checkmate (immediate mate in 1). Grandmasters would take about 45 seconds – 1 minute 15 seconds to solve this. This just demonstrates their command and supreme knowledge of this game.

The quicker and all the more precisely you can do these “board vision” puzzles, the better you most likely are. At the end of the day, there is a high relationship between your capacity to answer questions like these quickly and accurately and how well you play chess.

It’s astounding on the grounds that the issue does not ask for information about discovering “great” moves. Truly, it gets some information about checkmate, nothing intricate or complex that Magnus Carlsen can only solve – it’s either checkmate or it’s definitely not. There’s no special requirement in the inquiry, for example, “Is move X better than move Y?” or “What’s the best move you can discover right now?” or “find this move blindfolded” type of thing.

All you have to answer the issue is to know the standards of chess: knowing bunches of openings, endgames, standards, and popular games won’t help you here. This practically levels the playing ground and an absolute beginner who just learned the rules of chess yesterday might beat an advanced player (not likely but rather hypothetically conceivable).

What does this let us know? It reveals to us that the capacity to take a simple glance at a chess board and simply make sense of what’s going on (without examining or imagine future potential outcomes!) is a critical aptitude, one I have named “board vision”.

Other alternatives which improve board visions are:-

Solving board visions related exercises – Research has long proved that attacking a particular study/exercise consistently in a rather long period of time inevitably improves the person performing the activity. In other words, Practice makes a man perfect. Doing similar exercises over and over again have a register on your brain and you become more adapted and not only improve your speed but also your intuition.

Playing slowly in long time control games – I cannot stress this enough. This will allow you to develop your imaginative power and will give you a firm grip over your fundamentals as you are practically using the concept. However, just playing will not help. You can use the same two step method after the game in random positions. You should also analyse the game with a engine for at least 15 minutes.

I wanted to include some board vision puzzles here. But I wanted to provide you a general overview and 2 tips to improve it. I’m definitely planning to release some puzzles in future articles, so stay tuned for that .Good luck in developing your board vision. I wish you a happy journey.

Yash Mehta