The article is definitely not saying “it’s a myth that chess masters have great chess memory”. Anand is pushing back on a common layman perception, that the che

The article is definitely not saying “it’s a myth that chess masters have great chess memory”. Anand is pushing back on a common layman perception, that the chess master’s excellent memory for chess positions is just an instance of their excellent memory for everything. He tries to show that ‘chess master memory’ is quite narrowly limited (when there is no logic to the position, masters perform no better than amateurs) and also quite effortful (many hours of preparation and revising required to keep that information in their mind). More broadly, I’ve always found it interesting how chess tests very specific mental faculties. Memory of course, but the other big one is visualization. For most of the great players, when they are calculating many moves ahead, I believe they are visualizing the board in their mind and literally moving the pieces around so they can “look” at the resulting position and analyze it just as if it were laid out on the board in front of them. Those “blindfold simultaneous” games where a master plays against several people at once without looking at the board, they are holding the state of multiple full boards in their minds eye throughout the game.