How to Play Blindfold Chess
This skill is important for calculating long variations whether or not you want to play blindfold chess.
The first step is to learn to visualize an empty board - know the colors of the squares. To do this, Koltanowsky (In the Dark and The Adventures of a Chess Master) recommended learning the 4 quadrants - - maybe draw these now an then when you're doodling, or visualize a bishop or knight wandering around on it when you're falling asleep.
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Know the diagonals of the chessboard
These should be a single perceptual unit - like a2-g8 is a white diagonal with 7 squares. You often see strong annotators make comments like "White will break through on the h4 - d8 diagonal". You could do this by following a bishop around an empty board when falling asleep - maybe choose a White bishop one night and a black bishop the next. A pianist said "it's not enough to know the scales like the back of your hand; you have to know them like the front of your hand." So it is with diagonals for the chess player.
A Chess Meditation
That's Lev Alburt's term for this type of exercise in his book Chess for the Gifted and Busy. He gives an example of visualizing a Knight's path between 2 squares - for instance, given the squares f1 and c4, the path f1-d2-c4. This one's easy, but how about a path from a1 to g8. You can make up your own exercises, like finding all shortest paths between 2 squares; for instance between a1 and d4, there are 2 paths, a1-c2-d4 and a1-b3-d4, much like the electron that is supposed to take all paths between 2 points with different probabilities - I guess I thought of this exercise because Alburt is also a theoretical physicist.
Learn to play over games without a board
Start out with short games. You could go over them once just to know where all the pieces are and what are all the legal moves at each stage. I had to see what pieces changed their range of motion with each move. For instance, after 1.e4 "now the pawn can move to e5 or capture on d5 and f5. The Bishop on f1 can now move to e2, d3, c4, b5 and a6. The knight on g1 can now move to e2, and so can the K/e1 and Q/d1, which can also move to f3, g4 and h5". This tedious verbal exercise helped me isolate the skill of visualization that takes relaxation, from analysis which causes tension. When a game is stored in your memory this way you can do a more detailed analysis without strain, and you may see a surprising amount of tactics on the first pass.
How to recall the position
Koltanowski recommends starting from the first move mentally each time when you're starting out, if you have trouble recalling the moves. Later he did this in blindfold simultaneous exhibitions until the games reached distinctive positions. It is easy to get 2 games interfering in your mind, especially when 2 early positions are the same but reached through transposition.
Giving your first simultaneous exhibition
When you can play one blindfold game, you may be delighted to find that you can give a "simul", which is less of a strain on the memory than learning to play your first game.
This animation comes from a party in Berkeley long ago that I was reminded of when I read Alburt's book. Someone showed this puzzle, which is to move a Knight from a1 to a8 in a zigzag path one row at a time, but never moving onto a square occupied or controlled by a Black pawn. For instance right from a1-h1, then vertically one square to h2, then left h2 -a2, up one to a3, then right to h3, etc. until you reach a8. This isn't hard to solve, but the idea was to compete for speed. Walter Browne bet $2 that he could do it under 90 seconds and won. We made up more of these with different configurations of Black pieces and bets of $1 or $2. I recall Walter Browne, Mike Goodall, and Berkeley masters Allan Benson and Dennis Fritzinger at the party.
Doing this without a board after this party was a useful exercise in learning to play blindfold chess. Eventually I got it to under a minute, but it was too late to win a dollar!
