Girl’s memory, amnesia, and sclerosis? We treat it with draughts—no question about it.

Artem Alyoshin

– Radio Retro, you’re on the air!
– The staff of Polyclinic No. 15 would like to request a song about amnesia and heart attacks.
– ???!!! We don’t know any such song!
– Well, how about… this one… “”позабыто всё на свете, сердце замерло в груди”.”

About ten years ago, I was at the annual draughts tournament in Yaroslavl. Everything was as usual, I played a lot of games, got a bunch of ideas, even wrote some things down. I came home and forgot everything, and I couldn’t make sense of what I had written down. I’m sure many people are familiar with this. But the most valuable episode at this tournament for me was the following story.

The strongest athletes are racking their brains in an interesting six-on-six position. Let me stand here and watch too. The match ends in a draw. And Grandmaster Vladimir Vasilyevich Skrabov, whom I greatly respect, begins to scold the young masters who have just played the game.
“How could you, young people, this position is from MAG 92. Famous draughts monsters played it, you should know that, and you are trying to invent something here,” said Vladimir Vasilyevich.

At the same time, the checkers in the grandmaster’s hands jumped in different directions, returned back, and stood in such a bizarre way that Black had no chance of salvation. During this quick analysis, several more onlookers approached the table. Finally, the Yaroslavl Genius smiled broadly and asked us, “Did you remember? I remember, so now you remember and live with it, suffer, because why should I be the only one?”

Now let’s return to the first steps of novice draughts players and make some notes. Namely, memory will be very useful to us if we want to achieve high results in sport. Memory is also important in modern life, but as one famous detective story lover says, that’s a completely different story. You can learn poems, play memory games with your child, and all of this will have a positive effect on life in general, but, I repeat, we need specialized memory, in other words, black-and-white memory.

Let’s begin the exercise… What do we need for this? A board, draughts, and a child aged 4 or older.
We place a white piece on square B4, then another on square F7 and another on D3. We ask the child to memorize the position and turn away. We change the position of the draughts and ask the child to put them back as they were. We do this once, twice, ten times. The mistakes disappear, and the child does everything correctly. We add a second color of draughts, and then increase their number. Two weeks pass, our student is perfectly oriented on the board, we schedule an exam. We set the position, and he copes. Well, then, our trump card: next time, we don’t change the position at all, but only knock the draughts, as if we are making many moves. An attempt to confuse the prodigy so that he believes his ears rather than his eyes and begins to doubt. Well, if we suffer defeat at the hands of the youngster here too, then we should rejoice, because we have laid the first brick correctly.

We thought we had everything covered, but nope. The kid still has three and a bit left. So, let’s put all the pieces on the first and eighth rows. Now, let’s have white A1 take a walk across the dark squares to the black piece on square D8. And H1 will go across the white squares to C8. So, there are 5-6 routes. We watch carefully to make sure that the pieces only move along their own colors and strictly diagonally. Well, have the checkers arrived and visited? Now they have to go back home along the same route. We watch the child carefully. The trajectories can be changed each lesson and invented independently. It will be better if the child does not just move some white checker to a black one, but has Piglet visit Winnie the Pooh for tea and back.

If you have already done all this, call the coach urgently; he has had enough rest.