An attempt to learn blindfolded chess
This is one of my more unusual projects, but I still think it is worth sharing.
First of all, I do not consider myself as a skilled chess player. I would not say that I'm bad, but I have a lot more to learn. My ELO at Lichess is about 1400. I have played chess since I was a kid, but I have never been serious about it. I have tried to read some books about the subject, watched some openings on youtube and that's it. I have never played in a chess club or such.
I've noticed that my memory and concentration has been worse, I don't know if it's related to my age, doom-scrolling (Why? WHY?) or if it is just a phase. However, in an attempt to improve my memory and concentration I thought that learning to play blindfolded chess would be a good exercise.
My goal is to be able to play a full game of chess in 20 days. Blindfolded.
Day 1-2, the board
I started to practice so that I knew all the square coordinates good. I now have an intuitive feeling for the board and I can easily tell where a square is located. I used chess.com vision [1] to practice.
As soon as I started to feel confident about the coordinates I started to learn the color of the squares. I think I did this wrong though. Instead of visualising the board and the colors of the squares, I tried to calculated it mathematically. E.g. I know that a1, c1, e1 and g1 is black, then all odd numbers on those rows also have to be black.
I think this was a mistake, I should have visualised the board and the colors instead.
Day 3-4, Played my first game
I played my first game with my youngest son. He is 10 years old and knows chess well. So I played blindfolded and he moved the pieces for me and told me how he moved. I was surprised that I actually could keep track of most of the pieces by visualising the board in my head. I played about 10 moves before I lost track of the pieces.
Next day I played another game with my son, and I managed to keep track of the pieces until I got checkmated. I think I played about 20 moves. My ELO blindfolded is more like 100 :-) The hardest part is to keep track of those pieces that can move long distances, like the queen and the bishop.
Also, my gameplay is more to respond to the opponent's moves than to have a strategy. I think I need to work on that.
Day 5-6
I found this video on youtube [2] where a guy explains how to play blindfolded chess, it is worth watching.
Day 7-8
I won my first chess game blind folded!
I played against my 8 years old daugther, but I must admin that the victory was more due to her mistakes than my skills. But still. My personal victory is that I checkmated with help of a sniper bishop as I still find it hard to keep track of those long distance pieces.
It is still hard to build up a strategy in my head.
I've also realised that this is not really a memory exercise, but more a concentration and visualisation exercise. Not exactly what I was looking for, but still a fun exercise.
Day 9-10
I've headache for a couple of days now, so I've not been able to practice at all.
Day 11-19
Played one game every day. I lose most of them, but I can keep track of the pieces pretty well.
Day 20
I played my final match with my oldest son. I lost, but I managed to keep track of the pieces until the end. I lost my queen in a stupid move, otherwise I'm pretty happy with my performance.
Summary
This has been a fun exercise, but I don't think it has improved my memory or concentration as intended, but it has improved my visualisation skills for sure.
One thing I find quite interresting is that I'm able to play several games of blindfolded chess in a row. When I play e.g. Memory, I can only play one game, after that I remember positions from the previous game too well that I'm unale to get any pair at all. This is not the case with blindfolded chess.
Maybe that has to do with that you are using visualisation rather than memory.. I don't know.
I also learned about Aphantasia [3], which is a condition where a person is unable to visualise images in their mind - which is pretty hard for me to understand. It is interresting that peoples brains are wired so differently. Aphantasia does not stop people from learning blindfolded chess though, as they can use other techniques to keep track of the pieces.
Another thing I discovered was that the working memory is really put to the test. The biggest problems I get after a while are all related to working memory, those are freezing, forgetting and freewheeling. They mention those in the video I linked to earlier.
Freezing
If the working memory becomes clogged in complex board setups, all my head is doing is looping the same board state over and over again without any resources left to think about the next move.
Forgetting
Rather self-explained, forget where the pieces are. Not exactly where the pieces are are, but which squares that they protect. Example on this is a sniper bichop.
Freewheeling
When running out of working memory, the brain starts to freewheel. Basically just making random moves as it becomes har do come up with a strategy.