The first handicap

Today I played two games under semi-blindfold, but with the tiles representing my king and queen removed from the game board. It's a pretty trivial 'step up' in difficulty from before (after all, if you can't remember where your king and queen are then you shouldn't be playing chess - or rather you should be playing a lot more!), but then I'm still getting used to semi-blindfold as it is. I think the next step will be to remove the tiles representing my rooks.

I lost the first game from the position seen below (me as white), despite the pawns being locked and the bishops being of opposite colour.



Over all the game was pretty dull. Aside from trying to play c3-c4 at one point despite lacking a c pawn (the piece on c3 was actually a knight as it turned out) I didn't make any sudden unexpected tactical blunders until the endgame, where I seemed unable to really grasp the general position. This lack of strategic vision can be seen in the position below after black 16...b5.



Here it's pretty clear that white should reply with 17. cxb6, but apparently not so obvious when you can't see the pieces. When I look at it now I can immediately see ideas based on using c5 as a knight outpost (after Bxe4), or just play against c6 down the half open c-file. I think I'm going to have to work on making myself look at the position more broadly... it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees (which tree does that tile represent?...okay what about this one?...etc).

Towards the end of this game I locked my bishop outside my pawn chain, only to realise it would achive nothing there and was needed for defence. After that the loss seemed inevitable, although the computer insists I missed drawing chances.

The second game was against the same opponent (though almost twelve hours later in the day), and was rather more interesting. See below (annotations are included in the game viewer).

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I felt I was quite fortunate to be able to turn the game around after 22.gxf7+. Interestingly my 2 piece handicap (no tiles to represent king or queen) got 50% worse after 46...c1=Q, not that I'm complaining! I'm not sure whether the 'two hidden pieces' handicap made the game much more difficult - perhaps I would have realised that 22.gxf7 came with check.


The above image shows the position as I saw it after 20.g6. The only difference in terms of general impression I noticed during the game was that the rooks looked connected on the back rank when they were not, but I was aware of that.