Simultaneous Blindfold

This is for you woodpushers in the know. Just wondering how many simultaenous blindfold games I need to play at once before I can become GM level player. I read GM Gareev can do 60 or so. But he is 2700 GM. If I'm just satisfied with 2500 GM status maybe I can achieve this rating with less, like 40 or so? What do you guys think?

Playing simultaneous blindfold games will not make you a Grandmaster.

How many crossword puzzles will I need to solve before I become a world-class author?

I don't see the connection between crossword puzzles and writing a book, but no way you can convince me that I won't be at least an IM if I can beat up on people while palying 40 blindfold games at once.

Visualization is only one of the requirements for becoming a world-class chess player... and arguably, not the most important one.

Pattern recognition, accurate and capacious memory, logical thought, imagination, mental discipline, emotional control...

Only few can become a grandmaster at chess. You might be able to play 100 simultanious blindfolds and not be a master at all. If you focus solely on blindfold this will probably be the case.

If you master the things blueemu says in chess, you have a good chance of being an excellent player

I'm slightly confused. I thought mastering blindfold chess was the way to go.. but you guys are telling me there's other things I need to work on as well?! No wonder chess is so hard.

you underestimate the power of blindfold chess. You mean to tell me a guy can keep track in his head of 6400 squares and not being a master? You have any idea of the calculation power that this guy would have if he played a standard OTB game? Heck, you play 1.e4 and he announces checkmate in 46.

For how much we like to say that chess is an art, has creativity, etc. fact is chess is 99% calculation. You need some strategic elements of course, but these are either intuitive or easily learned.

Look, you get better at blindfold when you get better at other things. When you get better, you can see the chessboard without actually looking at it-something that REALLY helps in blindfold. But I'm not sure that blindfold HAS to help your chess.

Is it?

If you could calculate ten half-moves per second, it would take you three days (71+ hours non-stop) to completely analyze a typical position to a depth of TWO moves (for White and Black).

Obviously, brute-force calculation won't get you anywhere in chess. Your search-tree must constantly be pruned by sorting out the handful of valid candidate-moves from the host of "junk moves" that far outnumber them.

This requires judgement, not calculation, and is where the above-mentioned elements... pattern recognition, memory, imagination, etc... come into play.

Yes I see what you're saying;

Pattern recognition and memory are just "shortcuts" for calculating moves. You do need some judgement and intuition (after all this is the thing that makes chess great), but the importance of these are far outweighed by the concrete analysis of variations.

This is just my opinion of course. But correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't the "Soviet school" of chess the one based on busting your butt in learning how to calculate stuff?

As opposed to Silman's method: just learn few strategic key concepts and you'll beat everybody without the need for hard work. Also, you can lose 10 pounds of bodyfat in a week.

Come on, judgement and intuition is much easier to improvise then calculating a variation 12 moves ahead and seeing the board at the end. For me it's clear which skill should be nurtured and trained, and which one will follow naturally.

Certainly if you start including all the factors I mentioned above... pattern recognition, positional judgement, memory, etc... under the blanket label "calculation", then you can claim that calculation is the main skill required.

But this appears to be some specialized usage of the word "calculation" with which I was not previously aquainted.

Reti, when asked how many moves he typically calculated ahead, replied "As a rule, not a single one".

Yes, and Capablanca iirc said something like "only one...but it's the correct one". Ah, these are jokes :)

let's see positional judgement vs calculation then.

You know the stuff about outpost or bad bishop, for example. How much are these important compared to raw calculation (e.g. seeing 10 moves ahead)?

I used to think they were 50-50. Now I changed my mind.

Sure seeing moves ahead is important, but a long term strategy will make you win the game, and finding a plan is the most important thing, right?

Well the fact is that while on the example game of a strategy book the outpost will decide the game single-handedly, in your game things will be different. There will be a ton of factors to judge. You play for the outpost in d5? Your opponent plays for his piece activity, or his control of a diagonal, or a pawn majority, or one of 3 millions features of a chess position. In other words, a real-life position is just too complex to be analysed correctly only on general terms, and this especially for non-titled players.

And while you're trying to categorize the position in a Silman's imbalance, your opponent sees a 10 moves lines that tilts the game in his favour (I'm not even talking about tactics).

So how much value does your "positional knowledge" have in practice? I believe it's a really small value.

You might see a higher value for elite players...everybody can calculate a ton, who has more intuition gets the competitive advantage.

It's also the case that a really small positional inaccuracy at high level can cost a game, for amateurs it's unlikely to have any effect at all.

But let's say player A can calculate 10 moves ahead, and player B can calculate only 7, even if he has more experience.... Who do you think it's gonna win?

Playing blindfold is just an extension of our chess fluency at reading annotation from books.  So it's just one of the chess tools, albeit an impressive one.

Wonder whether any braille chess players may have the GM level.

tbh if you can beat 40 people blindfolded you are probably GM strength, however beating 40 people blindfolded does not make you a GM, as you must earn it in tournament games.

If you spend al your time on visualisation your technique wont be very good.

This is exactly the flaw in the reasoning. The OP reversed cause and consequence.

You could argue the same way that being invited to top tournaments makes you a grandmaster. And you might be invited to those (by massively bribing FIDE officials, for example). But obviously if being a GM is correlated by being in those tournaments, it's because only GM are invited, not because the invitation made them GMs.

So if GMs can play blindfold chess well, it doesn't mean that they become GMs by training blindfold.

start with 1

and yes, playing blindfold IS essential to becoming good.

as for how many you need to do to become a GM, ask a GM

No. Like : no, this is not true.

Force a beginner to play blindfold chess, and see what progress he makes compared to other people that started at the same time. You will see.

Becoming good makes you good or at least decent at blindfold chess. But that is not and never will be the other way around.

I can play blindfold chess, surely at least three without strategy with ease.  This is by virtue of my visualisation  and spatial abilities allowing me to see the entire board and pieces perfectly, but I am only average at playing chess becasue I have never studied chess and I move to fast to learn.

I am currently working on a strategy to memorize multiple chess boards with ease, by using pictures/objects which give the positions of pieces, and when combined will result in an easy to memorise image which gives the position of the entire chess board.  Converting to easy to memorise pictures is a great way to memorise things, look up memomics, and average people have been able to memorise lots of stuff quickly using them such as many packs of cards.  Ask if you want to know more about my stragegy, because I need someone to talk to about it, I want to exchange ideas.  Still early stages.

.

Suppose I succeed, I am hoping I'll be able to play 10 or 20 (I often imagine 30, is that too much hope?) simuli blindfold games with ease.  But this alone won't improve my chess skills to GM level, given my experience I think its clear that there are more important things to try for GM chess than blindfold chess.  I think study of combinations is very important, one thing I will never do.

I hope to use blindfold to improve my chess skills, but I doubt it is a prerequisite to GM chess.  Hardly any GM's take blindfold seriously either.  Even at the famous Monte Carlo blindfold chess tournament, the GM's use a board without pieces to move which is not true blindfold, and there is no real ranking system.