Saturday, June 23, 2007

Blindfold chess.
























Today I played a blindfold game and after 40 moves I took a break during an hour. After that I continued. It proofed that I had forgotten the location of only one piece from the 16 left pieces. That was because I had not taken the last move into account. I remembered the piece at its previous location, which is some kind of interference. This means that with blindfoldchess I commit the location of the pieces in my long term memory!

This reminds me of a story of GM Timman who refused to train a few young masters since they weren't able to remember their last played game without a score.

I have adopted a trainings regimen for blindfold chess and board visualisation of one hour per day. I guess that the standard must be that there is no or little difference between playing with or without a board. At that moment the lack of visualization skills will no longer interfere with my chess and cost me points. Are there readers around who have experience with blindfold chess during a longer period of time?

Today I start to have a closer look at "reasoning". Now let's see. . .

4 comments:

  1. Very interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing if you think it helps. I might start messing around with it a little.

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  2. The long term memory thing is really interesting; how long will you be able to recall the game? perhaps we should all replay our tournament games blindfold to get them into long term memory; there are stories of fischer being able to recall all the games he played in a tournament, even without using a board he could recite them.

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  3. The recall of the blindfoldgame is comparable with wath I recall from a normal game. It's now 9 hours after the game and I can reconstruct about 80% of the game. I estimate that in 50% of the cases when I have played against somebody in a serious game, I can recall the opening and "the essence" of the game even after 10 years. For instance my first game at the club in 1996 was against the Alekhine defense where I played 2.Nc3. I could trap his lightsquared bishop at d5 later on.

    But here I was surprised that I could remember the position since I hadn't taken special measures before the break. The telephone rung during the game and I picked it up. An hour later I returned to the game.

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  4. Oh BTW,
    DK wanted more women on my blog hence the picture.

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