I'm surprised this didn't hit on relational memory. In the latest edition of stupid human tricks, people are often surprised when strong chess players, or mysel

I'm surprised this didn't hit on relational memory. In the latest edition of stupid human tricks, people are often surprised when strong chess players, or myself, can easily repeat the moves of a game, from scratch, after playing - even substantial amounts of time later. It's all about the relational aspect. Chess games are easy because they tell a story in a strong player's head, and so to repeat the game you just tell the story in your head again. That's why if you do forget a game, just being told what the first move or two was is often enough to recall the rest of the game - kind of like being told the first sound of a word you're trying to remember. This is also why chess players can see a position and remember 'Ooo, that's from Reti-Alekhine' or whatever. You see games and the people playing become part of the story. It's like reading a page from a book and being able to say what book it was. On top of that it's also quite often an extremely important page, making such a demonstration even more trivial. There have also been a lot of studies testing this stuff. For instance, one briefly showed strong players a position that might actually occur in a regular game and asked them to recreate the position. And they did extremely well, whereas casual players did awfully. However, the interesting thing is that when asked to do this for positions with the pieces on random squares, strong players did not do substantially better than casual players. This has been attributed to pattern recognition, but in my opinion it's more about the story being told even on a single move - the ideas and possibilities. Again the difference between trying to repeat the words from a page of book as opposed to trying to repeat random words.