The importance of blindfold games for a chess player

“You never change your life until you step out of your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.”

Roy T. Bennett

There is nothing in chess that excites me the most than finding out a new way of training, not only because it helps me to be a stronger player but also an excellent coach. Some people freak out when they hear the word "new", this is natural human behavior, as we love to live in our "normal" realities.

Having a daily chess training routine is great, but at some point, you need to change and incorporate new ideas, otherwise, you will train the same thing over and over again. Getting results, but not getting the best ones possible. The improvement is outside our comfort zone.

If we create a dictionary of the most searched words in chess, we will obtain calculation, strategy, openings, endgame technique, attack technique, but one that is not so famous is visualization, which means the ability of one chess player to see the position in his mind, without pieces.

This is one of my favorite aspects of the game and it is incredibly related to calculation, since we can not move the pieces of the board while calculating, we are playing with a board in our mind.

Visualization can be trained like any other chess skill, there are different ways, trying to solve a position without pieces, replicating a game in our mind, and my favorite, playing a blindfold game.

In times of quarantine, we can even play blindfold online chess. To do that we need to go to settings on live chess and there we click on pieces.

Then we choose “blindfold”, click on save and that is all! Have fun giving handicap . You can see what your opponent played on the right of the screen on the notations.

Chess.com also has a site to play blindfold chess, but because it is not so popular, I would not recommend it, you can spend hours just finding one single game.

It is important to mention that this is just for TRAINING, at the beginning most of the time you are going to lose all the games but then and with practice you will clearly see an improvement in your ability to see the pieces when there are none. Do not take the result seriously and give your best, play blindfold chess is such a tough way of training.

You can even create an account just for blindfold chess as I did with GaboSalazarBlindfold. These are some of my best games:

At some point, you will get the confidence even to play bullet games

The longer the game, the more difficult for us to see the pieces, but also more rewarding our training

I am Gabriel Salazar, Fide Master, and chess coach. Available for new students, contact: gabosalazarolchowski@gmail.com