Read this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindfold_chess
they even play without board or pieces on 40+ boards in the mind simultaneously
can you actually see the board in your mind?
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Jun 1, 2022
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#3
Sounds like a stunt to me. Sure, with practice people can visualise familiar things without looking at them but that's not going to be more efficient than actually looking at them with their eyes.
I can visualise the chess diagram and move the pieces like how it happens on a computer. I can't do it fast like when the gm spits out 6 moves in 2 seconds. I don't always see the full board but if I want to use my memory to remember all the moves I can replay the game to the point and make sure I know where things are. I don't utilize this in fast time controls often. Best I can do is a quick variation blunder check after I intuit if a move works. Will need to work on this in the future. But it is all practice. Bruce Pendalfini recommends lieing in bed and just trying to visualise the empty board in the correct rotation with the dark squares running through a1-h8 diagonal. Once you can imagine the whole board start adding in the pieces and pawns to their starting squares. You cant visualise a game until you can visualise a fixed opening position. Imagination is a skill you can cultivate. Players lable the fixed positions and come back to them. It is a memory device something unique to associate the image they need with the combination of moves and distinguish them from another line. So start small and work up to it.
In general I think you have to be around GM strength (not even IM) to be able to play blindfold chess effectively, meaning without hanging pieces and blundering simple tactics.
As I progressed in rating what I found was that sometimes actually looking at the board and pieces can be somewhat "distracting" when in the middle of doing heavy or complex calculations, so I can imagine that top players are often doing some crazy visualization when they are looking away from the board. And maybe that is the point of doing tactics and getting familiar with patten recognition, to develop the ability to see combinations in your head more easily.
#5
"In general I think you have to be around GM strength (not even IM) to be able to play blindfold chess effectively"
No, that is not true. Some players without any title can play blindfold chess well at least on one board. Some grandmasters cannot.
There used to be Melody Amber tournaments where all players had to play blindfold.
The quality of games was good.
https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1018440
I watch Naroditsky and he often closes his eyes and grabs his third eye area and says "hold on I gotta calculate" and I wonder to myself what does that even mean. Then I saw a post here saying "visualization puzzle" with chess coordinates. Now I'm freaked out. You guys can close your eyes and put together a custom board with pieces fully present and actually run through lines? That's insane to me. When I close my eyes I can't see shit except little specks of sparks and darkness.