Chess Variant : Blindfold chess

Recently I can't say I'm playing chess well. I will not pretend I have played good chess once in my life but It's like I always want to jump at the throat of the enemy king and always forgot about the security of my pieces and my own king. Result, I'm losing one game after another.

As a refresher, I really welcomed the chess variants chess.com introduced recently. Especially one variant I appreciate is blindchess.

Inner eye?

I don't know how other people are playing blindchess. It's like asking someone "how do you think": "do you have an inner voice?" (surprise, not everyone : https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/inner-voice.htm), "Are you able to see images in your head or have you aphantasia?" etc. 

So this post is about to share my experience about blindfold chess, especially blindfold blitz.

Start position

Like you can see on the following picture, blindfold chess has the same start position as classical chess and pieces move the same way.

So if you can play classic chess, playing blindfold is like being already at home.

Play as usual

To feel really at home, you have to play the same openings as usual. Don't try to mess your opponent with an early queen attack. This is what happened in one game:

My opponent played his queen as soon as move 2 and lost it at move 4... Obviously taking on d4 was a mistake as the pawn was protected by my knight on f3.

Easy tactics

So how do you win at blindfold chess. Maybe I still don't have played enough games to answer this question but looking for simple tactic and simple trap seems the way to go:

• discover attack
• fork
• skewer

Here my opponent has his bishop on d3 attacked by my knight and rook... but it can't move because of the queen on d2.

Here my opponent is ready to lose his queen on g5....

Could there be a strategy specific to blindfold chess?

I found at least one but a bit dirty. It's not very difficult to deploy and I think one opponent tried it against me. The setup is simple : try to identify a target in one side of the chess board but during your attack, try to insert in between moves on the other side of the board. Sometimes it'll mess up the "view" of the chessboard and ease the process of winning.

The funniest moment

For me, the funniest moment is when the game ends and you can discover the actual chessboard by pressing "shift+alt+b". And this is why I like to play blindfold blitz games. When you or your opponent start to be low on time, you move quickly and you start to loose track of some pieces and especially pawns, which are often not part of your focus.

I didn't realize that my opponent had only his king left...

How do you do it?

So of course, it has to happen. In one game, an opponent asked me if I was actually cheating somehow. Of course no! But how am I able to play blindfold chess? I told him that it is something I can do since childhood but not the complete answer. I believe this is linked to memory, telling yourself the story of the game and how your pieces are working together. The best advice I could give to train yourself at blindfold chess is to try memorizing simple chess puzzle and solve them blindly.

And you, what is your experience with blindfold chess?