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BGonline.org Forums
Speaking of Marty...
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Speaking of Marty... (Fatboy)
Date: Wednesday, 4 November 2015, at 2:31 a.m.
Speaking from my personal experience in chess, and to a lesser extent in backgammon as well, I suspect that most of the players who do this don't specifically train themselves to perform this feat. It's simply a byproduct of their obsession with backgammon, which means in particular that
1. they have a large "database" of known positions and patterns in their brain that allows them to register all the details of any given position very quickly and accurately; and
2. they are deeply engaged with every move, and are sensitive to how each move contributes to the overall narrative of the game.
For them, recalling a game is more like recalling the plot of a favorite movie than like recalling a 16-digit credit-card number. I remember reading somewhere that a researcher interviewed various chess masters and grandmasters and asked them about their feelings towards chess. The masters tended to say the kinds of things you might expect, that chess was a very interesting game, etc. The grandmasters were more likely to say over-the-top things like, "Chess is the air I breathe and the love of my life; I couldn't live without it." When something dominates your emotional life that strongly, remembering things requires no effort.
If you do want to do some training, though, one thing you might try is to expose yourself to a backgammon position (from a real game) for a few seconds, then look away and try to reconstruct it exactly from memory. This will train you to look at all aspects of a position. A big difference between strong players and weak players is that weak players focus narrowly on a limited set of features of a position, whereas strong players look at the entire board and take into account every aspect of the position when evaluating the situation.
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