".ybab ,sdrawkcab og ylno I ekil sleef tI"
– alapmI emaT
Things are different backwards.
All the elements stay the same. The only thing that changes is direction, orientation.
And yet, our brains start to struggle.
In music theory, there's a concept called negative harmony.
Put simply, negative harmony is the inverted version of a melody. If the normal melody moves from one note to another note 3 tones higher, the negative harmony instead moves to a note 3 tones lower.
Up becomes down. Down becomes up.
Equal, but opposite.
There are a couple of channels on YouTube putting out excellent negative harmony versions of popular songs. Steve Cruickshank is the best at it, and this negative harmony cover of All Star is my favorite piece from him.
(He also does a version of Bohemian Rhapsody if that's more your speed.)
It's fascinating to listen to a negative harmony cover of a song you love. You recognize all the sounds, the timings, the rhythms. But the melody feels wrong.
It goes down when it should go up. And up when it should go down.
Despite knowing the normal melody so well, the inverted version is difficult to recognize and to predict.
It keeps moving the wrong way. And it confuses us.
It's not unlike those upside-down painters you sometimes see on televised talent shows.
They walk on stage, greet the judges, then start painting what appears at first to be random shapes and bursts of color on a canvas.
They paint and paint, more and more, but the image doesn't make sense. It looks like a mess. We get the obligatory shot of the judges looking confused and dismissive.
Then, magic happens. The music swells, the painter steps back, takes a breath, then flips the painting upside down, and – voila! – it's a perfect depiction of a celebrity!
The image goes from unintelligible to obviously Bruce Lee, and the only thing that changed was its direction.
We're awful at recognizing things when they're backwards. Our brains don't like it.
We get used to things one way, expect them to be that way. There's a load of extra processing required when we invert things.
In music, painting, and Chess.
So why do we expect ourselves to spot our opponents' tactical opportunities if we only ever practice from our own side of the board?
Almost every tactics book, puzzle tool, or patterns collection shares one trait: we always take on the role of the player with the tactic. We're looking for the win for ourselves.
When we train tactics, build pattern recognition, or complete Chess puzzles, we do so from only the one direction. Our direction.
Yet it's a major weakness in adult improvers that I see over and over again. We're bad at spotting when our opponent has the tactical shot.
A tactic coming the wrong way down the board is not all that different from negative harmony or those upside-down paintings. The patterns are all backwards. And that makes them much harder to see.
We're not used to them that way. Our intuition and pattern recognition don't fire the same.
Take a look at this mate-in-two puzzle.
Here's it from the opposite direction, with you on the receiving end:
Here's the same puzzle from the normal direction:
I think you'd agree, the normal direction feels a little easier to solve. The answer likely jumped out at you. The flipped one takes a little extra power. There's a bit of friction there with every thought. We're not used to calculating like that.
That's to our detriment. We can't afford to only train our tactical awareness in one direction.
We must teach our brains to play two-way Chess. Learn the patterns for ourselves and our opponents.
So we can win the game when it's there to be won, and catch ourselves before we gift our opponent the tactical win instead.
The great news is that it doesn't take much effort to learn this. We don't have to do some wild training regimen to build strength here. We just have to get our brains used to things coming the other way.
And you can start training it immediately.
Here's what I recommend:
Flip the board 50% of the time when training tactics and solving puzzles.
That's all.
Half the time, solve puzzles as if you're on the receiving end of the tactic.
Train your brain to think about the board this way around. Practice considering your opponents' plans and ideas. Practice dismantling your own defences.
If you'd like to combine this with your conceptualization training in the Chess Visualization with Don't Move podcast (Apple | Spotify) or the Don't Move Training System, that's easy to do as well.
Before you start each exercise, simply choose a color, White or Black, and complete the exercise from that side of your mental board.
If you're on the "wrong" side for the tactic, great! Solve for your opponent.
Build comfort with the major patterns of Chess in both directions. (Become the Chess equivalent of this guy.)
I promise it will reduce how often you gift your opponent the tactical win.
If you want to go really intense into this idea, and I recommend you try this at least once, play an entire game of Chess with a flipped board.
This is not for the faint of heart, but it can be so eye-opening.
It forces you to create and execute plans for your "opponent" in a way that you never do in a normal game.
If you try this, take the time to reflect on how much more effort the game takes when you do this. The tactics you miss. How much more attention you're placing on the pieces moving toward you on the board than you normally would.
Play unrated or try this against a bot. It's so uncomfortable for your brain to do this that you'll probably lose the game. But the experience is worth it.
Conceptualization is about more than seeing moves ahead. It's about training your brain to handle the information of the Chess board.
About the muscles of attention, pattern recognition, and retention.
We train muscles by working them.
Noticing your opponents' threats is a conceptualization muscle like any other. Work it.
Flip that board.
,yenruoj eht ot s'ereH
nediA
