Yeah. The only thing you really need to be great at chess is to play a lot, on longer time controls, and to analyze your own games.
It’s such a common stereotype that chess is all about memorizing openings, like cramming for exams the rest of your life. It’s not. Cramming is all short term memory and people tend to forget everything a few weeks after the test. That doesn’t work in chess.
Great chess players have everything in their long term memory. They can rattle off openings and transpositions like nobody’s business. But they didn’t just study that stuff yesterday. They built it up over years of playing and calculating during games and analyzing the results. It’s much more akin to a great violinist who can play the Sibelius by heart than it is some high school kid cramming for the SAT.
It’s such a common stereotype that chess is all about memorizing openings, like cramming for exams the rest of your life. It’s not. Cramming is all short term memory and people tend to forget everything a few weeks after the test. That doesn’t work in chess.
Great chess players have everything in their long term memory. They can rattle off openings and transpositions like nobody’s business. But they didn’t just study that stuff yesterday. They built it up over years of playing and calculating during games and analyzing the results. It’s much more akin to a great violinist who can play the Sibelius by heart than it is some high school kid cramming for the SAT.