Replaying a played game from memory

[tekesta]

A Chinese lady who I met for the first time yesterday told me that to replay a game from memory, one has to know why they played X move in Y spot. She told me as well that I was not able to remember a freshly played game because I did not think about the logic behind my moves. This nugget of advice still sticks with me even now.

My current practice, at least with professional game records, is to replay a particular kifu over and over again until I can memorize all the moves.

Has anyone here had to replay a game entirely from memory?

[Boidhre]

Tomukaze is good at it. I'm not sure I've seen him do one right to the end but I've watched him replay a game from memory until the late midgame a couple of times even when he was much weaker around 10k. He seems to have a good knack for it. I get lost after only 40-50 moves normally.

[xed_over]

yes, its easy (with practice).

and she's right, its easier to remember if you have specific reasons for each move (and it actually doesn't matter if the reason is a correct reason, it just has to be your reason)

[quantumf]

A Chinese lady who I met for the first time yesterday...this nugget of advice still sticks with me even now.

An amusing choice of words

Anyway, kidding aside, practicing will help. What will really help is if you can play an over the board game and reconstruct it with your opponent (I guess online is fine too, but post-game reviews are rare on the Internet). They will help remember the moves, presumably because they can remember the logic behind their crazy moves

[wineandgolover]

I find it much easier to remember my own games than pro games.

Pro games might have good reasons for 99% of the moves, but my games had my reasons, however flawed, for half.

You received good advice yesterday. If one can't remember their moves, they probably aren't thinking enough.

[logan]

She is correct, it's more difficult to replay moves whose reasoning you don't understand, and as such it remains more difficult to replay the moves of someone else. As a player becomes stronger the ease of which he or she can replay moves increases. This is because the mental associations become stronger as one imprints more and more patterns together with their reason for play. As such, replaying other players' moves will remain more difficult than replaying your own, because their connection of patterns and personality combine to create a reasoning that is different than your own.

As for how many games I've replayed from memory, I've lost count.

It may also be useful to ask, What is your purpose for memorizing a game, what do you desire and expect to get out of it, and would the purpose, desire and expectation affect the kind of approach you would take to trying to memorize a game?

[SoDesuNe]

Replaying games becomes easier with practice as xed_over said. I don't know if it has to do with the "logic behind the moves", though. Most of the time I cannot understand a pro game but I can easily remember 150 moves (pre-endgame) after I replayed it twice.
I also can replay my own games even if I can't find any logic to my opponent's moves.

Besides practicing to remember games I think one needs to have a bit of experience with Go in general, in the end there are a lot of patterns. That's why I have so much trouble with remembering forcing moves ^^

Overall I woudn't recommend focussing on memorizing professional games. I think replaying one game three times is enough and then move on to the next games with new patterns and stories to be told : ) You can always come back later, you know? =)

[TheBigH]

one has to know why they played X move in Y spot. She told me as well that I was not able to remember a freshly played game because I did not think about the logic behind my moves.

This implies that it's easier to remember your own moves than those of your opponent, because you may not always understand why they played the way they did.

[Bantari]

one has to know why they played X move in Y spot. She told me as well that I was not able to remember a freshly played game because I did not think about the logic behind my moves.

This implies that it's easier to remember your own moves than those of your opponent, because you may not always understand why they played the way they did.

I would say - it is easiest to remember one's own moves, because you know the reasons behind them. Or you should, in any case.
Remembering your opponent's moves is slightly harder, as you say, but still easy because they have to either flow from your moves or your moves have to flow from them. Or they should, in any case.

Both, your and your opponent's moves are easier to remember than moves from 3rd persons games, like pro games.

Another factor here is the level of the game - and it also has to do with reasoning. Beginner games are very hard to remember because a lot of their moves are not very rational, as are the opponent's responses.

In general - memorizing the game is a combinations of high-level memorization (like reasons, whole sequences, joseki, etc.) and low-level memorization (simply remembering specific moves.) The former is easier, the latter is harder. So the more of the former you can pack into your memorization technique, the easier it gets.

Having said that, it is possible to memorize the whole game without understanding anything at all (you don't even need to know the rules) - but it is easier the more you understand.

PS>
I use low-level and high-level because these are the words that came to me first. They don;t follow any formal definitions in the field, just differentiate the two ways of memorization I am talking about.

[lightvector]

I wonder if I don't think enough about order of moves in the endgame.

For games I've just played, I can usually replay the whole opening and midgame effortlessly, but once it gets down to the stage where moves are worth about 3-4 points or less, I usually get lost as to what order everything happened in, even if I know roughly how each local area ended up.

[TheBigH]

I wonder if I don't think enough about order of moves in the endgame.

For games I've just played, I can usually replay the whole opening and midgame effortlessly, but once it gets down to the stage where moves are worth about 3-4 points or less, I usually get lost as to what order everything happened in, even if I know roughly how each local area ended up.

Probably because in the end game, different parts of the board stop influencing each other and there are lots and lots of miais.

[wineandgolover]

I wonder if I don't think enough about order of moves in the endgame.

For games I've just played, I can usually replay the whole opening and midgame effortlessly, but once it gets down to the stage where moves are worth about 3-4 points or less, I usually get lost as to what order everything happened in, even if I know roughly how each local area ended up.

This is true for me too. I blame byo-yomi, a lousy understanding of the endgame, a state of denial about all my bad moves, and fatigue.

[Koosh]

For the very reasons mentioned above, I often have trouble completely recalling a game that I've played next day when I was playing black with handicap against a strong white player bent on tearing me apart.

It's not so difficult when they play on the same plane of logic as I do, though!

I do have to record games I play in tournaments as I play them, though. Can anyone here recall 4+ games played during a day long tournament without recording them during play?

Maybe the problem is that I don't review and record them immediately afterwards...

[Chaos]

I can review between 30 and 40 moves and then play them back, as long as nobody launches into an extremely complicated battle right away, that is.
But when I'm playing a game I don't tend to remember my opening moves until I review later.
It's something I should really work on xP