r/chess • u/jdesert21 • 17h ago
META I spent two weeks progressively training blindfold chess to improve my calculation — here's what happened
Hi everyone,
Two weeks ago I started an experiment: progressively training blindfold chess to see whether it could improve my calculation and tactical vision.
I've been using increasingly difficult visual constraints:
Board freezes → I can only see the board every X moves.
Pieces become checkers-like tokens → I can see the board, but without piece identities.
Pieces disappear → after a certain number of moves, I have to keep track of the position mentally.
The idea is to use the first two as intermediate steps toward full blindfold play, rather than jumping straight into it.
After two weeks, here's where I am:
Board freezes: I'm now at 9 moves out of 10 before seeing the board's actual position again. The progress feels quite noticeable: I'm less lost and the position feels much clearer in my head.
My last game against Stockfish was a good illustration: 92% accuracy and a very controlled win.
Well… I only noticed afterwards that Stockfish was actually set to 700 Elo 😅.
Pieces replaced by tokens: 3 moves out of 4 is still pretty hard. I'm starting to win occasionally against 1300 Elo Stockfish.
Pieces disappearing: 1 move out of 2 now feels quite manageable and I've had several wins. I've started trying 3 moves out of 4, but no wins yet.
Position reconstruction: I started this one this week. A position from a Lichess game is displayed for a few seconds, then I try to reconstruct it on an empty board without looking at the original.
It's difficult… but strangely addictive. 😅
For now I'm using simple positions with 4–8 pieces, and I can reconstruct them correctly roughly 20% of the time.
The goal here is to isolate one particular skill: building a precise mental representation of the board before calculating.
Has it transferred to my regular chess?
At the end of the second week I played two 10-minute games on Chess.com to see whether I could feel any difference.
Two wins, and a new peak of 2044 elo.
But the games themselves tell a more interesting story.
In the first game, I felt pretty much in control. From an equal position, I calculated a fairly complicated line which eventually won me a rook.
The second game was much messier. I made two one-move tactical blunders in the opening, leaving myself in a losing position.
I kept fighting and eventually found a series of sacrifices leading to a nice mating threat that my opponent missed. The sacrifices were also confirmed by the Chess.com analysis afterwards.
Overall, I feel that my tactical vision is getting sharper, and especially that I'm more comfortable calculating complicated lines.
Obviously, two games and two weeks of training are nowhere near enough to conclude that blindfold training caused any improvement in my rating. But it's encouraging enough that I definitely want to keep going.
What I'm trying to achieve
I'm starting to see a logic in the training:
- Reconstruct positions
→ build a precise mental representation of the board.
- Play with visual constraints
→ maintain that representation while calculating.
The idea is to work on visualization separately, then put it under pressure during calculation.
Over the next few weeks I'll gradually increase the difficulty: more pieces in the reconstruction exercises and stronger visual constraints.
And I'll keep playing some rapid games to see whether the feeling of improvement persists.
Have any of you tried something similar?
For those who already play blindfold: what does the board actually look like in your head? Is it a fairly precise visual image, or something more abstract? And have you noticed an improvement in your regular chess from practicing blindfold?
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u/CyaNNiDDe 2300 chesscom/2350 lichess 17h ago
Can I ask genuinely what you're trying to improve on? It doesn't sound like you're trying to just get better at blindfold chess, but rather like you're using this as training for "regular" chess.
If that's the case, why do you think this is more beneficial than just outright doing calculation or visualization exercises? It seems to me a little bit like wanting to build muscle, but instead of going to the gym you decided to get a job at a construction site.
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u/Einstein003 16h ago
Calculation becomes much easier if you can imagine the board and the pieces in your head. this looks like a spatial intelligence training, which GMs are rumored to be highly talented in.
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u/jdesert21 16h ago
I'm actually trying to work on my calculation. The idea of training blindfold chess didn't come completely out of nowhere, though.
I follow several chess Youtubers and for example, I saw a video where one of them was playing against Aronian. At some point he told Aronian he had a weakness in calculation. Aronian asked immediately : have you practiced blindfold chess ?
That's just one anecdote, but combined with a few other things I've read or heard, it made me want to take on a little challenge and see for myself what I could brind.
And to be honest, I find the idea of trying to play blindfolded exciting.
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u/destinofiquenoite 13h ago
I'm still on the team that mental visualization is a passive skill that develops over time when you train other skills.
I don't think it's common at all for top players to just have trouble to picture the board and calculate (and well, if they do, they are still top players, which means it's not a must have skill). I don't think they train this either, nor I think they would consider this skill something worth to be trained or that it would improve their other skills.
Yet some people here on Reddit really love the idea of playing blindfolded, which is fine and it's a skill in itself, but when people start to mix arguments and saying blindfolded chess will make them calculate better just seems off to me.
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u/Sirnacane 17h ago
sloppiest ai slop there is
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u/jdesert21 15h ago
Hello, to be fair I used en AI to translate my post, I'm not a native english speaker. I thought it sounded natural but to be fair I'm on the wrong spot to judge.
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u/Liszt_Ferenc 16h ago
All of this reads as very human except for the „but the games themselves tell a more interesting story“, which sounds a bit awkward and unfitting to me. Some of y‘all need to read and write more than just tiktok subtitles, sorry.
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u/TheGammaPilot 16h ago
Just curious, what were the AI tells on this post?
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u/WePrezidentNow classical sicilian best sicilian 15h ago
The wording and grammar were kind of the giveaways. Then there's the somewhat suspicious things like the em-dash (my mom actually uses these, so I don't instantly assume it's AI).
There's just a "writing style" to AI that is really obvious if you use it a lot. Kind of a shame that despite the post being kind of interesting I found myself mostly being annoyed that it was written by AI.
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u/TheGammaPilot 15h ago edited 15h ago
Thanks for the reply. There was a selfish reason I asked about it. I am building an AI content writer for brands on LinkedIn. I have a humanisation pass at the end of every article.
I know there is low trust for ai writers, particularly on Reddit. I actually use AI extensively. I know that he has replaced emdashes with dots and other symbols. I was just curious of what other apparent AI tells were there. If it's something that I haven't already accounted for, it will help me improve my product.
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u/TheGammaPilot 14h ago
Why is this downvoted?
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u/RetisRevenge 13h ago
Cause you're trying to build more of what they're complaining about. No disrespect cause I'm sure you mean well, but that's likely the issue
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u/TheGammaPilot 13h ago edited 13h ago
I get it. That's actually why I asked. I'm building a tool in this space, so I'm genuinely curious what makes the writing feel obviously AI-generated.
Also, I do think it solves a real problem for founders. It's not just AI writing. It's about a continuous pipeline of things to write about as well. Not every one has the money to splurge on Google ads or Amazon ads, which btw are inauthentic as well, but people are ok with them. The basic point of LLMs is that they are good with language. So, writing seems like a pretty direct use case for it.
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u/DenseSand 16h ago
I’ve thought about doing something similar because my calculation is terrible. Thanks for sharing
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u/AggressiveSpatula Team Gukesh 15h ago
You can also play with invisible pieces. So you’ll see the square highlighted where the last piece moved, but after that it’s all memory.
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u/MutedStudy1881 12h ago
I like to play daily games, and when my chess app sends a phone notification (eg “opponent played e6) I try to visualize the position from their game, their move, and my response, before actually opening the app to see the board.
It’s a passive way of doing this but very effective
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u/DieKestenkammer 16h ago
I am working through the book Cognitive Chess by Chernyshov, which gives you five exercises a day to improve visualisation. I am not sure it is making me a better chess player, but it is an interesting mental exercise.
The difficulty in the exercises varies, though. There are some endgame puzzles there that I couldn't solve even if I saw them on the board.
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u/jdesert21 15h ago
Would you mind sharing one or two examples ? This is exactly the kind of things I'm looking for
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u/DieKestenkammer 15h ago
Sure.
So, some of those exercises work with diagrams and some with texts. The diagrams give you a position a few moves into the game and you have to reconstruct how we got to the position. Then a second position a few moves later, how did we get from Position Nr. 1 to Position Nr. 2?
And in other cases it's all text. Easier questions like, "Which color is the b5 square?" or "What squares are on the f1-a6 diagonal?"
There are normal tactics, except he just tells you where the white and black pieces are and you have to come up with the solution without ever having seen the board.
Or he just tells you the first ten or so moves of the game, and you have to find a tactic in the position after those ten moves.
Oh, and stuff like "Can a white knight on e1 stop black pawns on f4 and h5?"
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u/jdesert21 13h ago
Thanks a lot, this is exactly the kind of advices I was looking for. I will get this book.
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u/PillowPantsXX 1880 uscf 15h ago
Youre over thinking it. I recommend just going full blindfold, not using a computer screen at all and just getting a friend to read moves to you and play moves for you. Its not that hard to do.
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u/Snoo_90241 Lichess patron 17h ago
Is there any site where you can try this?