Opinion: Interesting training idea or waste of time?

I was thinking of writing out the notations of say a 30-40 move high level chess match. Everyday I’ll spend some time attempting to play it out in my head, start to finish. The idea is to strengthen visualization as well as analyze the game in addition to my regular studies. Also for fun.

Thoughts? Anyone else do this?

FWIW I don't think that's a bad exercise at all. I think Soltis recommends something like that in his "Inner Game of Chess" book. (just doing it once, he's not saying to do it all the time).

 

I think it will have diminishing returns, but I think it will help improve your visualization. Lets say every day for a month you visualized one full game all in your head by using the notation. IMO that's great. You'll probably want to move on to a different exercise after that though.

 Once a friend wanted to practice his blindfold chess so I was sighted and he played blindfold.

He's a better player than me, but it was enough of a handicap that I eventually won a pawn, and won the endgame.

Then we played sighted and early on he made a big oversight and lost a piece to a 2 move tactic 

 

I agree that blindfold probably doesn't help regular chess, but I don't know if I'd call it harmful. Maybe a waste of time but not harmful.

Botvinnik had his image to consider. He also pretended to believe blitz chess was bad... so much so that when he wanted to play blitz to help prepare he did it in secret.

Since i'm no where near smart enough to be able to answer this question, i will just say this.  If its something you enjoy doing, gets you to study, and helps your game, then go for it.

Timur Gareyev broke the world blindfold record.  Has it helped him in his OTB play? No.  Has it made him a better GM? No.  He is a very solid 2500-2600 GM, that had a goal.  He accomplished something to be proud of.

Yeah, that makes sense.

 

Years ago I decided to try some practice games to see if it was good training. I decided it was a waste of time.

With the free program winboard you can make moves by typing and also hide the board so when the engine moves it just shows it in the notation. I played some games like that.

Dont do that, bad idea. Choose a opening that is easy to reach (Petroff, Vienna, Italian, Ruy, Scotch, QG, KID, KG...) Then choose a defense for black againts common openings. Or choose a system for black so you can defend lots of openings with it.

Sometimes patzers can solve offensive tactical problems in 5-7 moves deep, yet routinely miss opponents’ threats that are only 2-3 moves deep because they are “not used to those quiet positions” nor used to solving from the perspective of defense or drawing.

You need to be able to “see” or calculate X moves deep in EVERY POSSIBILITY (quiet, defensive, drawing, strategic, posiitonal, etc) before you can claim to be able to see X moves deep, even if you can sometimes easily solve certain problems that are X+3 moves deep (which usually are more concrete and forcing lines).

Of course, as Magnus implied, the ability to evaluate the positional subtleties at the edge of one’s visual depth limit is a different skill.

@S_Tierney I feel that this would be a good exercise if you want to read chess books without a board. If you blindly follow the moves to visualize each position without thinking about each move, it might not help as much. It may be better to find critical lines of GM games through analysis without moving the pieces just as you would an OTB or online game. I personally like to blindfold analyze variations from books and then play them out. Moving the pieces helps secure the image into my brain for later reference and helps me double check my analysis. It won't be super long lines from the books. After you analyze 3-5 moves from the current position and branch those 3-5 times per line you are looking at 9-25 different positions. Of course that number will vary due to the number of lines, but you can always analyze other variations that aren't played as well.

@everyone else This isn't about him playing blindfold chess. He wants to improve his visualization. 

Well, the title is asking about a training idea, specifically whether we think it's a good method or not