How to Play Blindfold Chess - Part 2

When you can play through a short game without a board, the next step is to analyze simple endings, starting with just one or two pawns.
This can be interactive - try to solve a study without moving the pieces, check your solution by moving the pieces or clicking through the solution to see if you missed anything, then add detail mentally until the position is completely solved. Recalling the solution is a good way to continue to improve at visualization without stress. Go for quality, not quantity.
For instance, the Reti Study

Analyzing this without a board helped me understand why it seems impossible at first - the White King seems too far out of the square of the black pawn, by thinking more about the chess board geometry - a diagonal move and a vertical move are the same speed, which is like having a car that goes 100 mph south or west, but 141 mph southwest or northwest, contrary to daily life.

In the morning when you wake up, before opening your eyes, you could recall an endgame and analyze it before opening your eyes, when the hypnagogic imagery from the dream state is still active - maybe carry out a basic checkmate of K +R vs K, and advance to K + 2B's vs King, and even K + N vs King.

In his book In the Dark, Koltanowski tells the story of the visiting chess master Branco Tchabritch who gave a simultaneous exhibition in his home town of Antwerp, Belgium when Koltanowski was a teenager. Koltanowski didn't believe this was even possible and asked the method . Tchabritch said he painted a chessboard on his ceiling so it was the first thing he saw when he woke up. Kolty's parents wouldn't allow this. But how important is size? Why not just have a board or diagram of an empty board on the nightstand to look at after you open your eyes.

People with photographic memories may have developed this skill by "photographing" things-  looking at objects and retaining the image. It seems most people can develop more of this skill in areas of interest, like artists who paint detailed scenes from memory.

When Philidor played a two game simul  one journalist wrote that the scores had to be kept or no one would believe this was possible.
That's why I consider Koltanowski a first-rate educator - with his methods the average player can learn to play a game and later even give a simul. Koltanowski recommends playing one game well before giving simultaneous exhibitions.

My story
Learning blindfold chess was a long, arduous task for me, with years between attempts before I could even use Koltanowski's method successfully. I had already read Koltanowsi's advice and heard his lectures, but hadn't taken his advice to visualize a board, thinking it had to be painted on the ceiling. Emanual Lasker noted that a lot of players skip the step of learning to visualize an empty board, "...not suspecting its value". (Lasker's Manual of Chess, page 4).
My first games with training partners were full of blunders, sometimes illegal moves, misplaced pieces, "retained images". (Zak, Chess Psychology).
A few ideas occurred ideas sporadically over a long period. Eventually I gave two successful simultaneous exhibitions.

Some of my best exercises that may cut down your learning curve

• Memorized all the diagrams in Nimzovitch's My System so I could think about plans without a board while waiting in lines. More people can calculate a simple variation in a blindfold game than can find a good plan. Koltanowski played a tandem simul with Alekhine, who complimented him on knowing his plans, and said that he was the second best blindfold player in the world.
• Memorized the first 70 games of Irving Chernev's 1000 Best Short Games of Chess to analyze them mentally in detail - at first I planned to memorize the whole book, but got most of the value of the exercise after about 70 games. You'll have a game memorized by playing through it with Koltanowski's method of backing up each time. These days there are many sources of quality short games.
• Made up remedial exercises described in the first post, like saying to myself what pieces changed their range of motion with each move and reviewing puzzles without a board for speed.
• Took a popular course to improve visualization through relaxation, meditation, self-hypnosis and breathing. Three months later I gave a successful simul (3-1 against an A, B, C and
  D player) and another one a couple years later (2-1 against two A players and a B player)

Benefits of blindfold chess

Improved memory and concentration are noted by Koltanowski, as well as chess strength.

I got an original (to me) result in geometry while working in the field of computer graphics (it turned out the Baron von Koch had found this much earlier, but this was beyond anything I hoped for earlier).

It helped later when I studied music theory and composition, as well as visual arts.
Chess is considered one of the three universal languages with music and mathematics in the novel The Eight by Katherine Neville, a fictional story with plausible conversations among Philidor, Euler and Karl Philip Emmanuel Bach.

Hazards of blindfold chess

There really aren't any that I know of, but wanted to dispel an urban legend - the myth that blindfold chess was illegal in some places because it is too stressful. If you look at the conditions of early blindfold exhibitions you see smoke-filled rooms without ventilation. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that the stress  Morphy or Alekhine experienced was due to performing this difficult task while being asphyxiated from second-hand smoke.

Alekhine blindfold simultaneous exhibition

Recommended practices

• Solve endgame studies and nonstandard puzzles without a board. These develop imagination. Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, I enjoyed the retrograde analysis problems of Raymond Smullyan in his books The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes and The Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights.
• Get plenty of air - play in a well-ventilated room and breathe deeply, slowly and rhythmically.

What was the last move?

Koltanowski constantly solved and composed problems and enjoyed nonstandard puzzles.

The Method of Seeing and Saying

I once tutored a talented 9 year old living at Stanford. His mother had a PhD in Child Development. I described Koltanowski's method of saying the moves to yourself while visualizing the board and pieces.

"If I were explaining this to a 5-year-old, I might call it the method of 'Seeing and Saying', if you see what I'm saying". 

"I do see what you're saying", she said, apparently impressed.

Some time later watching television I saw an add for a new preschool educational product from Palo Alto called Seeing and Saying.

I was amused, but my phrase is just a marketing slogan for the real educational product of Koltanowski.