Learning chess with brain damage

It must be hard.
However, paralympic athletes pull off remarkable results despite their handicaps: tennis with wheel chairs, cycling with one leg, ping pong with mental disability...

"making stupid mistakes when I SAW the danger and then forgot about it and moved something anyways" ++ This is quite common, also for players without any brain damage. The solution is mental discipline. Think about your move, once you have decided, assume it played and check it is no blunder, then play it. For the impulsive: sit on your hands.

I am schizophrenic before i had chess lesson. I excel at 30 min rapid and my highest rating in this account is 1700 rapid. But i don't have symptom anymore with medication. 

Stick with longer time controls and you will do just fine. 3 minute blitz would probably just cause too much unnecessary stress as that requires extremely fast thinking and even people without cognitive issues suck at blitz lol.

I lost a lot of memories, after a concussion.

My chess game did suffer; but bit by bit, day by day, I'm trying to get it back.

Slow progress, not always gaining, but month by month we can get better.

I have brain fog / take medication. I only play long time controls (multiple days per move) so if I have a bad day, I can just try again the next day.

I can't calculate far either so I'm learning more about positional play, it's easier for me: pawn chains, placing rooks on good files, blocking opponent pawns... those general ideas are easier for me than calculating far ahead.

When looking at existing games, I need multiple days to play through them. And some days I can't do it at all. Frustrating but that's how it is.

I have amblyopia, which is an inability of my brain's visual processing centers to make sense of the images my eyes receive.  I can't read with one eye, for example, even though I can see the shapes of letters (they're "disconnected" or scattered around).   

I very often lose games to not seeing direct threats (ie. one of my pieces on the same diagonal as an attacking opponent's bishop).  Sometimes diagonals seem to blur and blend into each other.   Sometimes I visualize knight moves incorrectly.  It's not an "experience" thing, when it works, it works (90% of the time), and when it doesn't, I can't detect that it hasn't until it's too late.

I've played thousands of games and studied for hours and hours  in the hope that maybe I could improve my vision overall, but I think it's not helping and my chess is actually getting worse.  I can't break 400 elo in blitz or 600 in rapid....    I also have the frustration of not being able to remember any positions at all easily, I can learn it eight times and forget it the next day.  Weirdly, tactics seem to not be affected, I'm 1900 or so in puzzles.  Actually playing tho - nope.

I think some people will just never be good.   You have amazing patience to be able to play a correspondence game though, it would just bore me to tears....    and it sounds like maybe some of your issues are actually stuff you could work on?   Who knows though.  If you want to talk about chess, chess frustration, brain stuff,  play a game, or whatever, feel free to DM / friend me.

Judging by Mr mudds terribly low elo I imagine he also has brain damage. Poor fella hope you get ssi

I wish you so much luck on ur chess journey and u are already inspiring! 💕 

OP

Ur not worth talking to mr mudd. Ur rude and insensitive. This will be my last response to u. Have a great day.

Whoom, there it is!

I just really needed to see this. Thank you so much for sharing your journey. I hope to be brave enough to share mine one day.

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