I didn't want those pawns anyway

One funny thing about playing chess on ICC with the display settings set as blindfold is the screen you are confronted with when you promote to a piece. In the position below I had just played c2-c1=...?

Wait a minute, which empty box is the queen?

I can now give my very first tip guaranteed to improve your rating during blindfold on ICC - the box on the left is the queen! [From the left it goes Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight].

Having managed two wins and a draw in my last few games I felt it was time to press on and make things a little harder, so today I played my first game without my own pawns visible.

The above picture shows the position as I could see it at the end of my game today. The board is looking pretty empty these days as I approach actual blindfold play. I lost the game, but am generally quite happy with how it went, seeing as I managed to keep track of the everything for a long time despite it getting quite complicated.

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Pawn structre creates the stragetic landscape on which the game of chess is played out, and not being able to see the pawns in blindfold can make the overall position quite a lot harder to grasp. In this game I did not anticipate 12.Qb6+, perhaps because it's unusual to have a check like that across the board despite a closed centre and zero piece trades. In a 'sighted' game the weakness of that diagonal would have been easier to notice.

There is a much greater cognitive load in blindfold. It's a bit like being completely new to chess in that you have to deliberately look at each individual piece. One thing I noticed during this game was that although I managed to keep track of which squares were controlled by my pieces, and also the placement of my pieces for the purpose of checking they were not hanging, I did struggle with noticing where squares were obstructed by my own pieces. This eventually lost me the game and is something I will have to be more aware of in future.