They have blind tournaments... for blind people I mean. The ones that have been blind from a young age I think are around 1500. Players that used to be masters but lost most their sight due to old age or sickness would of course be stronger.
And Ray Charles was what, estimated at class A? I just know the people who usually show up to these tournaments generally top out around 1500. It wouldn't surprise me if you'd find stronger blind players playing in sighted tournaments.
Define blind.
In the USCF the kind of vision impairment that would qualify one for their blind tournaments will still allow enough vision to look at and analyze on a normal board.
In that case someone like Smyslov would likely have ranked well.
If by totally blind, there was such a player in the 70s, a strong master (probably FM by today's standards). A Yugoslavian as I recall. He played in his head, using no braille board.
In the 2009 US Blind Championship the winner, Dennis Cummings had a rating of an expert. There was another player rated higher, also an expert, who withdrew after a couple of rounds. He felt he had an unfair advantage because he was legally blind, not totally blind.
See the documentary Algorithms. The winner in the junior category form Russia was 2200 and the top blind player from India was just over 2000.
Ratings info ; http://www.olimpbase.org/2008bl/2008id01.html
Graham Lilley is/was a very strong player from the UK, regular on the tournament circuit here. I believe he beat the late great Tony Miles
As for the strongest blind player, overall, my guess would be GM Peter Biyiases, who won the Canadian Championship, in the 70's, but eventually went blind, due to a condition. As for the best female blind player, I'm guessing it's a Russian master, somewhere, though I'll gladly be a runner-up.
What confuses some folks about the term, "blind", is the fact that blindness has varying degrees. Though some players in our division are partially-sighted - like myself - others are NLP, meaning they have no light perception, at all. The qualifying standard, of course, is whether a player can see well enough to drive. (If not, they are generally considered legally-blind, and are classified as simply blind, for competition.)
While my slow and quick ratings seem stuck in B Class, I play a decent game of Blitz, as an Expert, officially. I suspect I'm among a very few blind players who even bother with Blitz, however, but I feel pretty good to have achieved at least that.
Chris Ross
capablanca !
I am not talking about blindfold chess :)