Blindfold execution

This is a follow up to the entry I posted a few weeks ago about solving a blindfold puzzle. I've been having such bad results lately in my games that I was getting dejected and didn't want to do my regular chess work, particularly analyzing my games. My morale was low so I decided to shake things up a bit and try something new--something where I might see some evidence of progress. I decided to try to learn how to play blindfold chess, or at least improve my visualization skills.

I was encouraged by the following Youtube video, where IM David Pruess is teaching a group of his students to follow a game blindfolded. It's a long video and moves kind of slowly, but worth it if you want to teach yourself how to do this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK9eXu7RmdI

To be fair, Pruess is trying to teach his students how to follow a chess game in a book without using a board rather than playing blindfold, but the skill involved is essentially the same.

The number one thing I took away from the video is that Pruess claims that you don't have to picture the board and pieces in your head in order to do this. He says he doesn't, and he's able to play seven blindfold games simultaneously. This goes against just about everything else I've read about playing blindfold, and gave me some hope that I might actually be able to learn how to do it. Following along in the video and trying to answer Pruess's questions (e.g. "What piece is on the b6 square now? Can any pieces be captured in this position?") offered further encouragement. I didn't always answer correctly but I often did, a lot more than I would have expected.

So I'm devoting some of my chess time now to trying to improve my visualization, ultimately with the goals of being able to play blindfold and to follow games in books without having to look at a board. Pruess thinks this can be done with about ten hours of intense work. I don't know; he also asserted that anyone who had played chess seriously for more than a year knew instantly what color every square on the board was, an assertion that was quickly disputed by a number of his students (I would have been one of them). Anyway, there's no doubt that trying to play or follow a game without sight of the board takes a lot of mental energy. It doesn't come easy, and as Pruess says, this is probably why you get something out of it. Just as lifting heavy weights is difficult but eventually makes you stronger, doing difficult mental exercises is the way to exercise your mind. If you want to do what you couldn't do, you've got to do what you've never done, and it's hard but it's how you get better.

It's not clear that learning to play blindfold or follow games in books without a board necessarily improves your regular chess strength, but there's definitely a correlation. I know of no master-level players who can't play blindfold chess at all, and most can play multiple games at a time. Meanwhile down here at patzer level I know of no one who can play blindfolded against a competent opponent (though presumably there are a few).

Nevertheless I think this kind of training could be very beneficial. The other day I was at the gym running on the treadmill, a horribly tedious exercise, when I decided to pass the time by doing a chess puzzle in my head. I decided I would think of a knight on the a1 square and then think of other random squares around the board and see if I could steer the knight to that square. I did this for about ten minutes. Not only was it a good way to pass the time but I found it wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. Pruess is right; you don't have to "see" the knight and board in your head in order to do this. I think I was perfectly capable of doing this type of self-created blindfold puzzle before, but I had never tried. It's invigorating to discover that you're capable of doing something you didn't think you could do. Just as important, because I tried, I was working on chess for ten minutes that otherwise would have just been spent thinking about how much I hate running on the treadmill.

The discovery that I could do this opened up a lot more possibilities. The next time I walked my dog I decided to make the same puzzle more challenging by imagining a Black queen on the d5 square and then seeing if I could march a White knight from a1 to h8 without landing on any squares controlled by the queen. I found I could do that too and it wasn't that hard, even without being able to see the board and pieces in my mind's eye. I was surprised to find that I had this ability; I just had never tried anything like this before. And again, I spent probably five minutes working on chess in my mind while walking the dog, five minutes that I otherwise would have spent thinking about how much I hate walking the dog through the remains of a snowstorm we had earlier in the week (actually I usually listen to chess podcasts too).

The next time I tried it I stepped it up, trying to get a knight from a1 to h8 against two enemy bishops. This was much harder. In the previous exercise against a queen even without being able to visualize the position in my mind it was not that hard to deduce which squares were guarded and which were not. Against two bishops I had a lot more trouble and I made many errors; I changed my mind a number of times about whether I could land on a certain square or not. It took me a long time to even decide whether the knight was capable of crossing the diagonal set up by the two bishops on adjacent squares. It is, and this is obvious in one second if you're looking at it. I couldn't visualize it, and had to figure it out slowly square by square: d5 is guarded and d6 is guarded but e6 is not. This took a lot of mental energy, which if Pruess is right means I was doing some good work.

I'm still a long way from being able to play a game blindfolded or follow an entire game without looking a board, but there are a lot of exercises you can do to build toward that. I downloaded an app for my phone called Chessviz where you can do a lot of them. Later I found another one helpfully titled Blindfold Chess Training. On a PC you can go a website like noirchess.com. When you're sufficiently good at it there's even a podcast called Blindfold Chess where each episode is just a voice calling out moves from a famous (or not-so-famous) game where you try to follow along in your head. Audible Chess is similar. And you can play a version of blindfold chess on Lichess when you feel like you're up to it.

Maybe I'll get that far and maybe I won't, but in the meantime I've been reinvigorated by the pursuit of blindfold ability. It's hard work, but in the short time I've been doing it I've already made a lot of progress, which is a lot more fun than being stuck on a plateau (or even sliding back down) like with my regular chess. Hopefully progress here will result in some progress in my chess in general, but even if it doesn't it's still fun to learn a new skill.