Bruno furst memory course
The system works by assigning a consonant to each of the ten digits of the decimal system, and then assigning a keyword to nine of those digits. That’s how I learnt the Major System, although I don’t remember it being referred to by that name in the course itself. The sales copy was very well done and it sparked my curiosity, or whetted my appetite enough for me to buy the course and to work through several of the lessons. He was selling a memory course consisting of twelve lessons, a mnemonic dictionary and one or two other supporting materials. Bruno Furst used to post ads in British newspapers with the headline, “You Can Remember.” Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s an American called Dr. Bruno Furstīefore I answer that question, let me mention how I found out about it.
So, how does the mnemonic Major System work? Introducing Dr. It should help me to get well set up in the opening and quite possibly to enter the middle game with a small but significant advantage, if I don’t screw things up on the way! Once I have achieved that level of familiarity with the openings, I should be able to tell if my opponent is sticking to one of the plot-lines or is deviating from it or, as is more likely in the casual chess scene that I play in most of the time, has simply lost the plot. However, the challenge for this year, 2020, is to take the next big step and create easy-to-remember stories that relate each opening variation to the keyword that is associated with it. I know, for example, that the 36th variation (the “Magi”) is the first of the five Semi-Slav variations that I have listed before the Nimzo-Indian kicks in with the 41st card (the “Rat”). So far I have learnt the keywords of the first variation of each of the different defences to 1.d4. I’m already feeling the benefit of having the 184 opening variations available in an easy-to-check format. The keywords are tied to the number of each variation by using a mnemonic memory system called the Major System. Then, over the Christmas and New Year holidays I numbered all the variations, attached a keyword to each of them, and then copied all of the variations into two sets of study cards. I spent the next year or so mining the book and getting the first few moves of each of the variations into a notebook approximately in the same order as they appear in John Watson’s book. So I decided to change my approach and create a truncated version of each of the variations and plug them into a mnemonic memory system to hammer them into my addled pate. I had spent two years working through the book but had simply not absorbed the information well enough to recognise the Grünfeld Defence the first time I encountered it in a competition.
However, it was only when I got back to my hotel room and looked up the opening in Watson’s tome that I realized what it was. (I posted a rather poor quality video about the game on YouTube.) In fact, by the summer of 2018 when I entered an afternoon open tournament at the British Chess Championships in Hull, I was bested by a teenager who responded to my 1.d4 opening with the Grünfeld Defence. I took copious notes of all the variations, with red lines linking the variations of variations and so on.
I spent the next couple of years slowly plodding through the book. The Slow Approach to Learning the Openings… for the British Chess Championships in Bournemouth in the summer of 2016. The project developed out of my attempt to improve my technique in the opening when I bought John Watson’s A Strategic Chess Opening Repertoire for White from just before heading to the U.K.