I have a considerably harder time with a few pieces for each side on an open board, queens being a nightmare. If, as they say, your strength drops 500 points when you play blindfold, mine must drop a hundred or two more in those kinds of end games.
I wonder how much this holds true for fluent blindfold masters?
I do alright at blindfolded chess, provided I can scholars mate my beginner opponent.
Some blindfold players just have more of a knack than others and this can come through in blindfold speed chess.
A local master was getting a plus score at blitz vs. an A player. Normally I'd expect more of the A player but this master just had a better hand at blindfold than other masters of his rank.
I actually don't think I'd be bad at blindfolded chess. The other day I was trying to recall a game I played the previous night and I wrote down twenty two of the moves without looking at a board.
I don't know if that's related, but I could picture lots of standard positions and what not, in my head as I did it. For example, my opponent fianchetto his dark squared bishop and castled kingside, I didn't need to remember where his king, dark squared bishop and f,g and h pawns were.
It seems like the same sort of rote memorisation. I've never really tried it before. Nobody I know knows the notation well enough to dictate a game to me.
If your software permits it, play a blindfold game on easy. It may be entertaining for you.
Sometimes you just select the blindpieces piece set.
hmmm the only software I really have access to is on chess.com.
What you're suggesting is a computer which doesn't display a board or pieces, but reads out notation? And you type back?
That does sound nifty.
Nowadays they give you a blank board and you click on the squares. To be fair, don't look at the board while analyzing. They stare at screens for the Ambers and so to my way of thinking they are not true blindfold tournaments. I'd play much better if I could look at an empty board too. It might even cure my endgame ills referred to above.
My old Sargon IV would accept text input but I had to cover up the part of the screen that showed the board. I don't know of modern text-entry options though.
FICS lets you set up a blindfold account. Free server of course. Maybe you could play some weak sister engine there.
In the meantime I'll search for free proggies that let one do blindfold. Maybe Fritz 5....
When I set the pieces to "Blind All" in Fritz 9, I still see small dots where the pieces should be. I wonder whether that's intended.
@Kupov
If you dl free gui Arena, and then free engine rybka 2.2n2, you should be able to play blindfold.
" You can also play Blindfold with ARENA free Chess Software (see the How-To pages)
Details with Arena:
1) First save your curent appearence before any change. go to Options >Appearence and select tab Istallation. There click Save Appearence (e.g. as Standard) , press APPLY and OK. The setting is saved as a file with the extension cfg.
2) Then go to: Options>Appearence>Pieces and select Diagram fonts: Diagram TTBlindALL or DiagramTTBlindBlack or DiagramTTBlindwhite then press APPLY and OK.Stay in Options>Appearence and select tab Istallation. There click Save Appearence (e.g. as BlindfoldALL) , press APPLY and OK. 3) Return and load from Options>Appearence your standard settings. When you want to play BLINDFOLD got to Menu>Options>Load Appearence... press and select BLINDFOLD. When you have finished your blindfold game, go back to Menu>Options>Load Appearence... press and select your Standard settings."
http://www.freewebs.com/pc-chess/chessdocs.htm#BLIND
If the piece formations are really standard, it's going to be easier to remember the position. Pieces go everywhere in the endgame, and so that can be tough, unless the material is really really sparse. The other thing is, of course, that the longer the game goes, the more prone the blindfold player is to making a mistake, both becuase there are more moves to forget (or to remember a move being played which wasn't) and because he or she will get fatigued.
It seems to me that most really strong players are pretty good blindfolded (at least all of them that I know are). This isn't exactly the same set of skills as recalling games, but they're similar, so it makes sense.
That's interesting he said that endgames are harder -- Endgames are easiest for me to play blindfolded because I understand the plans. For me anything positional in nature is much easier to play blindfolded, you understand the plans and can manuver accordingly.
Tactics on an open board are surely the hardest. Endgames are much more positional, maybe he doesn't know much about the endgame and tries to calculate a solution. Some strong class players don't know crap about endgames.
As to a special skill to be able to do it -- I don't think so. When I was 1600 like you I could play a partial game blindfolded (I'd forget a piece or something by the end or would have to stop bc of forgetting too much) now I'm class A and it's not bad. There is expert at club who can do 2 at once very easily, I'm sure he could do at least 4-5 (I definatly can not!)
Even if you're just a so-so player if you've played a long time I think you'll eventually find you have the ability to play blindfolded.
@Kupov
If you dl free gui Arena, and then free engine rybka 2.2n2, you should be able to play blindfold.
" You can also play Blindfold with ARENA free Chess Software (see the How-To pages)
Details with Arena:
1) First save your curent appearence before any change. go to Options >Appearence and select tab Istallation. There click Save Appearence (e.g. as Standard) , press APPLY and OK. The setting is saved as a file with the extension cfg.
2) Then go to: Options>Appearence>Pieces and select Diagram fonts: Diagram TTBlindALL or DiagramTTBlindBlack or DiagramTTBlindwhite then press APPLY and OK.Stay in Options>Appearence and select tab Istallation. There click Save Appearence (e.g. as BlindfoldALL) , press APPLY and OK. 3) Return and load from Options>Appearence your standard settings. When you want to play BLINDFOLD got to Menu>Options>Load Appearence... press and select BLINDFOLD. When you have finished your blindfold game, go back to Menu>Options>Load Appearence... press and select your Standard settings."
! Thanks Goldendog. I will post some results soon, for a laugh.
I have a couple of questions about playing blindfold chess.
I was playing chess at my club today. At the end (01.00 after midnight, after multiple beers!!!) I was challenged by a strong player at my club. His rating is between 1900-2000 and my rating is approximately 1600. Normally this wouldn't be very fair, so he was going to play blindfolded. We both had 7 minutes on the clock. We played for a while, he got a positional lead, but when we got to the endgame (after 20 turns) he started to make inferior moves and ultimately he lost due to the fact he forgot the position of his knight. He claimed the endgame is much harder blindfolded even though there are less pieces on the board. Apparently because the lack of reference points (if that is an english expression). Is this true? It seems to me that if you manage to get through a complicated middle game, the endgame should be a piece of cake.
After that two other players (rating 2000) decided to play blindfolded against eachother, 7 minutes on the clock. This game was of such a high level that I thought they were looking (which they were not!).For one of the players I was pretty sure that he played almost as good as he would if he was looking. Does it take some kind of special talent to play blindfolded nearly as good as normal, or do all players of that level have the ability to do that?
Anyway, it was an awesome experience and I can only hope to ever achieve that level!