CHESMAYNE

Blindfold Chess

“Colin-Maillard (Blind Man's Bluff)”, Jean-Baptiste Pater

A game of chess played without looking at the board or MPs/mps. In the past players were literally blindfolded but nowadays they play with their back to the board. Janos Flesch played 52 people in blindfold chess. A simultaneous display in which a top-rated player plays two or more opponents without looking at the MPs/mps or board. Some can play 20 or more games in this manner (usually winning all games). A game played without sight of the board. Blindfold players must keep the position in their heads and call out their moves in chess notation. Their opponents must also call out their moves. Some chess GMs can play a number of different chess games blindfold at the same time. Sometimes both :A and :B are blindfolded (moves are relayed verbally to each player). Blindfold chess has been played for 1000+ years. A world record of 56 games played in this manner is held by George Koltanowski (achieved in 1960). Buzecca (Muslim) was the first European blindfold player (played two games blindfold in 1265). 518 years later Philidor played three games blindfold. His record stood for 74 years (1857), when Louis Paulsen played four games blindfold simultaneously. Blindfold chess is forbidden by law in Russia! - it is considered artistically pointless and harmful to one’s health.

Chess played without sight of the board. Some players have been able to take on dozens of opponents simultaneously in this fashion.

Blindfold Chess: a skill, through which minor masters can gain a world-wide reputation; outlawed in Russia because Morphy and Pillsbury died crazy! Blindfold Chess: a game in which the players play without a board, calling out the moves to each other.

Chess for Success - Blindfold Chess

One of the most important advances to becoming a master is the art of visualization. Some people are gifted with this ability and can easily see the chess board many moves ahead. However, for the rest of us, there is another way. I hope it works for you as successfully as it does for me. The secret to my bag of tricks is to keep things simple. So, with that in mind let’s go on a quest to joust with the obvious. At first you will make lots of mistakes as I did.

In my first blindfold game, I castled kingside while my BS was still on F01. It went unnoticed for over ten moves so I got away with it! I hope you do too! In diagram #1, the shades of these two long diagonals (A01- H08) and (H01- A08) are dark and light. On chessboards for the blind, dark squares/cells are raised and light squares are sunken. These long diagonals are extremely important in uniting the quadrants of the chessboard.

In diagram #2, two quadrants, (A05, D05, D08, A08) and (E01, H01, H04, E04), are highlighted with box’s. The long diagonal (H01- A08) unites these two quadrants, through their centers, on the light (sunken) squares/cells. The other two quadrants are united through their centers with the long diagonal (A01-H08) on the dark (raised) squares/cells.

In diagram #3, the lower left-hand square/cell is always dark (raised). The 4 x 4 pattern of dark and light squares/cells is the same in all the quadrants.

The fight for control of the center is paramount in modern chess. Simply knowing the shades of the four central cells is not enough. If you understand that they are crossroads of the two great diagonals then you are on the road to central visualization.

When your cell is not on the two long diagonals, count the cells vertically or horizontally from these two diagonals to the cell you are trying to visualize. Remember to alternate shades as you are counting. For example, D01 can be seen by counting from the (A01 – H08) diagonal and alternating shades ie, 1-dark, 2-light, 3-dark, 4-light!

Can you see the piece too?

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Blindfold

by Aleksey Bartashnikov

Blindfold is a chess training computer program. It includes a Test and a Game. It is intended to improve the speed of comprehension and to extend the capacity of operative memory. These two parameters are of great importance both for progress at school and for successes in chess. From the point of view of chess this program is aimed at diagnosing and training a chessplayer’s intellectual faculties called variations calculation and visualization.

Test

The aim of the Test is to reveal the extent to which your operative chess memory has been developed. That is, how successful you can be in keeping track of the numerous chessboard situations which replace one another during the kaleidoscopic counting of variations. The accuracy of visualization of piece positions and movements in the course of imaginary play determines the degree of correctness of the player’s positional evaluation and, consequently, his/her decisions.

Testing Rules

Here is a position to illustrate proper user actions in a test (see Diag.1).

Diag. 1. Initial position of a test

The program incorporates the notion of an interacting pair of pieces. The term refers to a chessmen couple in which one protects the other (or both pieces guard each other). In the diagram position Qc6 protects Ng6 and so the two pieces are regarded by the program as an interacting pair. When the commencement of testing has been confirmed by clicking on the Start button, the program makes a move - 1.Ng6-f4. Then all of the chessmen vanish from the onscreen board and the user has to indicate the square occupied by the piece which interacts with the unit that has just moved. In this particular case the correct square is e2, for it is there that the Knight-protected Bishop stands. As soon as you have indicated the e2-square the program makes its next move - 2.Be2-b5 (see Diag. 2).

Diag. 2. Position after 2.Be2-b5

The previous interacting pair (Nf4-Be2) is no more, but a new pair has been created (Bb5-Qc6). You must indicate the c6-square next. If you indeed do so, the program continues with 3.Qc6-f6, making it necessary for you to point to the f4-square occupied by the Knight, the piece which interacts with Qf6 (Qf6-Nf4). Testing continues in a similar way till it’s over. Below are some more moves with which the test may continue:

4.Nd3(Bb5) 5.Bc6(Qf6) 6.Qf2(Nd3) 7.Nb2(Qf2) 8.Qf3(Bc6) 9.Ba4(Nb2) 10.Nd3(Qf3) 11.Qa8(Ba4) 12.Bc2(Nd3) 13.Nb4(Bc2) 14.Be4(Qa8) 15.Qf8(Nb4).

A piece between the brackets is one which interacts with the unit that made the last move. The program has been so designed that there is only one pair of interacting pieces at any moment; each move by the program breaks the earlier interaction while creating a new one in which at least one of the pieces was part of the previous pair. A test is always 40 moves long. Only white pieces are employed. Testing is carried out in a “blind” manner, i.e. the user has no chance to look at the position; all there is to see is the empty chessboard and the trajectory of the piece being moved by the program. If you have: 1) erroneously indicated the square occupied by the interacting piece, 2) exceeded the time limit, 3) used a hint, the program regards your response as incorrect, and prompts you to restore the current position. As soon as the restoration is over testing resumes.

Game Rules

A Game called Dinamic Pairs is intended for maximum development of chessplayer’s calculation abilities and visualization. This Game is a good tool to train your blind play as well.

The playing rules of Dinamic Pairs game are almost the same as in testing, with the exception that:

Here you can play a non-blindfold game;
Time limit pertains to the whole game, not to each single move;
If the time limit was overstepped or an incorrect move was made, the current position is not restored and the player loses;
No hints are available.

Features

Test and Game have 6 difficulty levels depending on the number of pieces available on the board: the initial level deals with 2 pieces and the last one with 7. In the Test mode the program gives you first a task with just a couple of pieces. If the accuracy of your responses is 95% or higher, you will go over to the next level and deal with a test featuring 3 pieces. For transition to the next level from levels 1-5 you always need to reach the 95% accuracy target. In the Game mode you can set any difficulty level you like.

The game features two regimes - Visible (“seeing” play) and Invisible (“blind” play).

The Visible regime ought to be regarded as an auxiliary training facility. It is intended primarily for chessplayers of relatively low qualification and low ambitions as well as for children. In this regime the chessboard on the screen correctly displays the current position of the game; the pieces are always there and no operations are performed mentally. The Visible regime resembles the analysis of adjourned positions where the player can make each reviewed move on the board and never bother about calculating variations “in the head”. Play in this regime serves primarily to develop one’s attentiveness, to provide for an integral view of the interaction of pieces on the chessboard, and to speed up comprehension of that interaction.

In the Invisible regime the chess “characters” stay invisible most of the time; a piece only appears for a brief moment to display the program’s latest move. This sort of blind play resembles game analysis under real tourney conditions - when a chessplayer cannot move the pieces about and has to calculate possible lines of play in his/her mind only.

The Test has the Invisible regime only.

The main window of the program looks like this:

Click on the image to see it in larger size.

More detail description of the program you will find at the Chess Puzzles Series site (http://www.bartsoft.com/chesspuzzles/).

Blindfold is sold by Bartspft through the Internet for $25. Here is the link where you can download an evaluation copy of the program:

http://www.bartsoft.com/chesspuzzles/blind.htm.

Written by Aleksey Bartashnikov. HTML conversion by David Howe.

From ‘Chess Variants’ web page.