Hi all, I hope you’re safe and healthy.
I just started practising blindfold chess against the computer on lichess, and this isn’t too difficult for me as the 64 squares are there for you and so is the notation. But when I try to play blindfold without a computer just in my head, I find it much harder as although I remember the position, I cannot seem to visualise the actual squares.
Is there a specific way to do this - do you need to know the colour of each square just by looking at it? Thank you
I taught myself to play OTB blindfold chess and have a few exercises that may be helpful. My goals were to be able to play a decent game of chess blindfolded and to be able to read chess books without a board and "see" the positions the books referred to. Here are a few that will help to visualise the board:
1) Try to visualise a 3x3 board with colours.
2) Move a knight around a 3x3 board.
3) Try to visualise a 4x4 board with colours.
4) Try to play simple mini games on the 4x4 board.
5) Try to visualise the colour of each square on a full board and be able to say the colour of a specific square.
6) Choose a square and then say all the squares on the same diagonal as it or ask yourself something like where do the diagonals from this square intersect the d-file.
7) Try to move a knight from one square to another goal square on the full board.
8) Put a queen on the board (in your mind) and move the knight to a specific goal square so it's not attacked by the queen.
Once you've done these you should be able to beat a weak player blindfolded. The board will probably still be a bit fuzzy though and inactive pieces may escape from you. These exercises helped me improve a lot.
1) Try to recall positions e.g. Look at a position for 2 minutes and try to recall it a 5 minutes later or try to recall a cool puzzle or study you've seen.
2) Play through your opening repertoire in your head trying to look at sidelines you haven't considered and see why they may be bad.
3) Play through a game in your head only reading the pgn trying to understand reasons behind the moves and coming up with other alternate moves or even see if there are any hanging pieces/offer of pawn sacrifice. They don't have to be GM games. (Firstly maybe just do 5 moves then build up gradually).
4) FEN tactics. I found this to be the most beneficial thing by far. I looked up how to read FENs (very easy) and downloaded a load of mate in 2 problems in pgn form. Then I opened it up in notepad and read the FEN and tried to solve the puzzles. This is great but I did have to look for the ones without too many pieces otherwise it's too hard.
5) Practice playing blindfold games. You can do this in many ways - the was I started was playing against Stockfish level one and move on from there.
Good luck!