Chess Visualisation Training Blindft

Sort:
Avatar of jlovatto

Hello All I read about an exercise in Andy Soltis' book "Studying Chess Made Easy" to improve chessboard visualisation. The exercise is to place n number of pieces (which can increase as you get better) on a board and have someone call out their starting squares. Then the helper moves the pieces one by one and calls out Knight to f3 for example. The job of the visualiser is to mentally move the pieces each time noting what the board now looks like e.g the rook on a3 protects the Knight but the Knight no longer protects the Bishop on g5 etc and then repeat for 10 20 moves etc. Does anyone know of an app or computer program that can do this? Anything on chess.com?

Avatar of kleelof

Here is a forum post about this. It mentions at least 1 software as well as some articles about practicing:

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/chess-program-to-practice-blindfold-chess

Avatar of jlovatto

Thanks kleeof great reply! I will check that out

Avatar of David210

some 2 months ago, i played against a very strong player where he was playing blindfold and i was playing normal seeing the board.

It was kind of an experiment we were doing sort of, i had the black pieces since he was playing blindfold, at the beginning i took it as a joke, i thought ah the poor bastrd, so he played 1 e4 his usual opening choice, i had somewhat the dubious strategy of playing a complicated game with lots of pieces in the middle to take advantage of his blindfold game.

I played 1..g6 and opposite sides castling came, he castled on queenside and i did on kingside, now he is the sort of player who goes for the king and is veryyy good at it, u barely can give him an open file, it would be mate.

during the game i saw that he was actually playing like he was seeing alllll details on the board, even though it was full of pieces and complicated position, i started regretting for playing 1..g6 and underestimating him.

after a give and take in the midgame, where he first sac-ed material, than i retured some back, we reached a drawn endgame position, i offered him a draw, he actually declined, which shows his fighting spirit.

but since i know his type of game, i knew since the endgame was queenless and more manouvering was required than direct attacks, so using that against him, i made him make an "active" move but it was inferior, and after that i took the intiative fully, and won the game after that mistake of his.

after analyzing the game when it finished, i had made 2 errors, he had made about 3 or 4 perhaps, i played at 95% accuracy he did at 89%. 

the thing is he never had training in blindfold and played this good, like i was almost playing him normal chess, it was cool.

Avatar of cdowis75

Lucas Chess has training programs to help with visualization.

Avatar of cdowis75

Lucas Chess -- training-- resistence training