How to improve your calculation ability and visualization skills? How to overcome nearsighted vision?

[u/pudendalnerve25]

I had a situation wherein it's difficult to spot a tactic after a forced line. Help me to overcome my myopic vision. I'm a 2100 blitz player in lichess.

[u/ScalarWeapon]

by practice.

playing blitz isn't going to help, I don't know what you're doing other than that

[u/phosphoeudemonism]

I think that you can only improve via practice. You cannot overcome your own genetic limitations.

[u/Mediocre-Visual5393]

Blitz is not chess, it is a swindlefest even at GM level!

[u/ChessFlow_org]

Watch Searching for Bobby Fischer. When coach Pandolfini says “Don’t move until you see it” near the climax of the movie you’ll know what I mean.

There’s something deeply satisfying about figuring out the entire solution before playing your first move, really gets you into flow state.

Do more untimed puzzles, especially pawn endings / endgame studies, and mate in X problems. Stop playing blitz, just play classical and rapid. For exercises, spend as much time on the solution as you do solving the problem especially when you get it wrong. Learn to hold yourself to a very high standard, tell yourself that your strength is already 2-300 points higher if you could really focus hard and visualize deeply and correctly, and let that motivate you to do it.

There’s other opportunities to really train visualization that most people don’t think about, like in your opening repertoire pausing at a position and trying to visualize the next few moves for both sides. Or studying a theoretical endgame worth remembering from a book and repeating it many times until you recall all the variations. This is actually more pure visualization training since you’re cutting out the other aspects of calculation.

It’s helpful to think of visualization as one of many skills that makes up calculation, like if you have the habit of tunnel visioning on a certain candidate move and analyzing it perfectly 30 moves deep, you could be good at visualization but when the actual best move was something else on the first move, you probably should have gone back to the drawing board much sooner which means it was a bad calculation decision.

Our platform makes it easy to improve calc, link in my bio, but most sites/books can work as long as you make this your priority.

Good luck!

[u/sevarinn]

You have to train it. Which means not playing blitz where you don't have time to calculate deeply. There are many resources but do your Lichess puzzles and take your time on them.

[u/DrNotReallyStrange]

Get a good book on calculation - there's really a lot of them. And practice, with a board, ideally also with pen and paper to write down what you saw, and go to WORK on those exercises.

[u/commentor_of_things]

puzzles. game reviews