Originally posted by Goshen
Can anyone here play blindfold? I keep asking and no one replies.😠

Yes.

Originally posted by Goshen
Can anyone here play blindfold? I keep asking and no one replies.😠

maybe that's because no body does? I remember Korch saying he did play blindfold and was decent with it.

I think I'm no where around being decent in it, but I believe improvement is possible. I was having a hard time even copying a position from chesstempo and plugging it into fritz with one proper look. It was impossible with upside-down positions (black from bottom). Then I just forced myself to do so every single time after every problem and now I can easily reproduce both.

same applies to reading books without setting up a board. I had no idea what was going on in the predecessors book, now I can even follow the annotations and stuff. (still having some difficulty though).

all these make me think that in another planet, maybe there's a chance I'll be able to play a decent blindfold game. On this planet though I first need to play a decent non-blindfold game. 🙂

Originally posted by philidor position

same applies to reading books without setting up a board. I had no idea what was going on in the predecessors book, now I can even follow the annotations and stuff. (still having some difficulty though).

True this will help a bit.

The real builder has been analyzing at the board. I find quite often
my hands arn't moving nearly quick enough to move the pieces anymore. Its worthwhile
when analyzing a position, to get up walk away... If you do this and while away try to
draw the important forces you remember from the board, quite often you'll lead yourself
right into the answer. You'll get good if you do your analysis while at a board, because
you'll get lazy, and stop moving pieces. 🙂

I found that the more reading I did in descriptive notation, the more it built up my
board-sense early on as well. More endings helps too. Just takes some time to get a
factorial understanding of whats important on the board, its not about holding all
the pieces and squares and tactics. That'd be much too difficult.

-GIN

Originally posted by Goshen
Can anyone here play blindfold? I keep asking and no one replies.😠

This is a tangent answer... when I lived in Virginia and my friends and I traveled to New Jersey every February to play in the US Amateur Team championship, the drive was about 8 hours. We passed the time with two people playing a "blindfold" game, with the rest of us listening in and moderating the "virtual board". It started as a joke, but it turned out to be a lot of fun, and a great way to pass time in a car full of people.

I should add that it was a neat experience to have a car full of chessplayers having a "symbolic conversation" that was mostly silent between moves- everyone was focused and thinking on the same subject, with not that much actual verbal interaction.

Time flew as we did it, and I think it may have "warmed us up" for the tournament, because all four of us always ended up with performance ratings 200-400 points higher than our actual ratings. Of course, we always thought that NY/NJ ratings were inflated compared to VA ratings due to geographical variances and sample pools. All numbers lie...

Paul

Originally posted by Goshen
But when you're playing through games in books, some of the variations are 5, 6 moves deep. Can you follow those mentally?

Usually without any problems. The only time its difficult is if the variation is in a pattern
I haven't seen before. Once its learned, its not a problem.

-GIN