
Journey Into the Dark: My Blindfold Training
I have been playing blindfold games at my dorm for chess training since last year around this time (I'm now a second year at the University of Chicago). Even before that, when I was a beginner in my senior year of high school I would play blindfold games with a friend in my calculus class by writing moves on a notebook and passing it back and forth. I have found it helps greatly with visualization skills and calculation. My biggest simul blindfold success came in November 2012 (if I remember correctly) where I won three games blindfolded without clock. Until IM Rensch (aka "Papa Bear") released his "Full Board Awareness" video series I was unaware that we had a blindfold option here on chess.com. Upon realizing this excellent feature, I began putting it to great use. Here are a couple of my experimental training games on the live server of chess.com. I will continue to train this way in addition to studying famous games of masters and participating in local tournaments. I will show two successes and two failures to highlight my strengths and weaknesses with visualization. This is intended to be mostly for my benefit, but I hope others will enjoy the games (laughing at the silly errors and maybe learning from any instructive moments). Please leave comments if you have any tips or anectdotes to share. Thanks!
Game 1: This was played only a week ago (or thereabouts). A pretty big failure, littered with positional error and simple blindness. Time control was 10|0