Info on blindfolded chess

     I play chess on a daily basis yet I am not satisfied with my current skills. I've known about playing blindfolded but I never gave it much thought till just recently. I believe learning to play chess blindfolded is the next step to becoming better.I know how to but the process of doing it is my problem. 

     Could I get some tips to make the process easier to get into. I would also appreciate stories about your experiences playing blind folded.

(to give you a way to gauge my current skill level I'll share some of my credentials= I host 2 local chess clubs, I'm a member of my schools, I chess tutor children and adults, and I play competitively.)

I also admit I am a chess addict and proud of it. :)

The most difficult part would be finding out where to click with the mouse while being blindfolded. Maybe if you memorized all the hand movements used to control the mouse, you could do it, assuming you knew exactly where the cursor was when you started the game.

I suggest memorizing chess games as a first step towards blindfold play. It's useful for developing the faculty of visualizing a board without getting mixed up with the mechanics of playing a game.

Plus I think memorizing games is a useful exercise in its own right.

Lots of people come to similar conclusions. You wouldn't believe the amount of people who form similar plans and "conclusions", thinking they've finally cracked it, they've finally found the solution. The truth is that chess is a complex game and if any easy solution like that was found everyone would know about it. 

http://www.blindfoldchesstrainer.com/

great for improving blindfold skills, visualization skills, and basic board vision.

Here is an exercise for you  :  imagine an empty chessboard , place a knight on a1 and in your mind move that N to b2 in as few moves as possible . 

another : imagine an empty board  , place a lone bishop on d4 and now name all the squares it " hits " from d4 . Do not look at a board , just imagine one in your mind .... can you do this easily or is it difficult ? 

Cool, does this mean I can play blindfold chess? Because I can see in my mind that the quickest way to get a knight on a1 to b2 is 4 moves and if a bishop is on d4 it controls 13 squares. 

does the correct solution to the first excercise involve 4 moves, just curious, because i'm not sure.

Yes , it takes 4 moves .  

yay. i got one for you, can the knight move between the squares a4 and b7 in 2 moves or not?

this is probably becuase stronger players are more likely to play strong patterns that you already recognize, while weaker players (like me, admittidly) are more likely to make the kinds of errors you just wouldn't even think about. 

You are right , with weaker players its far more difficult for me to remember where their pieces and pawns are because there is no logical rhyme or reason to where they put them quite often . 

Indeed. in fact, I have recently made a sudden leap in skill that my ratings are still catching up with (lots of studying and time in correspondence where i could really analyze my moves), and now in live, i have to take a step back to recalculate sometimes because in the ruy lopez exchange variation, my opponent will recapture on c6 with their b pawn instead of their d pawn, preserving their center (since one usually plans to exploit white's stronger center when black recaptures with the d pawn)

Recapturing with the d pawn in the exchange Ruy is theory and its better than recapturing with the b pawn . 

I know. I finished typing all that, looked at what i typed, then said to myself "g-man, you must be even more tired than you realize. you put it the wrong way around and then said some of the reasons of exactly why they SHOULD capture with the d pawn." I fixed it.

yeah, it's after midnight here. i'm pretty tired.

Gettin late here too , dont forget to set your clocks ahead !  

Might as well do that now, then i'm going to try to get to sleep. I'm not going to get anywhere on my english essay while i'm this tired anyway. by the way, Reb, would you mind playing a correspondence style game or two against me? I know i don't even stand a chance against an NM at my skill level, but having such a game to analyze would be of tremendous value to me.

This is a good one, walk on these diagonals in your mind. Try to eventually do it without much thought.

Two things that helped me (Ive won 2 games blindfolded against very bad players, and lost a couple):

- remember structures instead of individual pieces. If you got a finacetto'd king you dont have to remember each individual piece, just remember that youve got a finacetto'd king.

- I had a booklet with chesspuzzles that gave the setup with chessnotes: (white)knight on a4, rook on h8, king on a3, pawns on etc. (<just example)
Visualizing the setup and then solving the puzzle gave me confidence! (even though they where puzzles you would solve in .1 second with vision... some I solved blind while 'setting up' in my mind. They where that easy, but it helped for confidence)

The hardest part for me in blindfold is to watch more than one/2 moves ahead, especially with knights. It takes time for me to make each move, check if I did it correct, and then try to think what's next. In the end it was easier then I expected and I was quite proud when I finished my first game (lost, but did keep track of pieces).