Now we come to the first bit of actual, hard work. I hope you brought your boots.

When I first reached this point in my own training, what I tried to do was to look at the lines I had created and make a series of observations and rules for myself that described the decisions I would have to make in these positions. It helped, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The rules were too ornate - they had too many exceptions and corollaries - and having them alone wasn’t enough for me to have a strong idea of what to play in games. The idea behind creating these games was for immersion, and to inform my intuition - to have a good instinctual response to a position. Stated rules weren’t nearly enough to get me there by themselves. What did it was memorization.

This memorization will not give you a canned response for every position that you will come across. It is not intended for that. It will give you quick, intuitive access to good ideas and plans in positions that will be similar to those that you face over the board. If you’ve done a good job of it, these games will be ideal for your personal training - they were played by the player that you want to become, who exists nowhere else in the world. They should be your best friends, and you should spend a lot of time with them. So spend it.

But, of course, you also want to be efficient. There are many online resources available to help a person to memorize chess moves, but I used Chessable. Chessable allows users to create courses themselves, and to use its platform to efficiently memorize the lines in them. This works perfectly for our purpose.

Once you have your games in a platform that helps you to memorize them, use it. A lot of memorization is just drilling - seeing positions over and over again, getting some moves right and some wrong, re-testing yourself on the ones you got wrong. One of the tricks that did help was to explain the ideas out loud while drilling them - my rules and observations came in handy there. I ended up pairing each game with a “talk track” of sorts - the things I would talk through when running through that game. When you have to explain things, your brain makes patterns out of them, and then your brain fits the moves into your patterns. The ingestion of those patterns into your deep memory is ultimately what you’re looking to do. Talking through the explanation of ideas is a time-tested method of assisting the memorization of those ideas.

Now, personally, my memory is not very good. I always have to go over the things I once memorized in order to keep them mentally available. It gets easier each time I run through something though, and I’ve learned to prioritize certain games I’ve constructed over others - some will be more important, or more inspirational, and you should pay attention to that and incorporate those factors into your prioritization of your review. My memory will never be perfect, but it was good enough to allow me to learn a huge range of new ideas and learn them well. And because I spent time selecting which ideas and moves I wanted to know, they’ve really served me well in achieving the goals I set for myself.

Of course, to this point we haven't tested anything against a real opponent. This is the next step, and we'll talk through how this should be incorporated into training.