Thinking gives you wrinkles

It's now two weeks since I played my first semi-blindfold game on ICC, and today marked my eighteenth such game. I have gone much further in that time than I had expected and now think the idea of working gradually from semi-blindfold to blindfold over thirteen stages is needlessly complicated and probably unnecessary.

In retrospect I'm also not entirely sure that the basic semi-blindfold (where all pieces are replaced by tiles) has all that much in common with blindfold, aside from making pattern recognition more difficult - it probably doesn't do much to help your ability to calculate. If I were to suggest a gradual approach towards blindfold to anyone now it would be rather more simple:

Stage i - Remove own pieces only
Stage ii - Remove all pieces
Stage iii - Remove all pieces and also own pawns
Stage iv - Remove all pieces and pawns

Decide when to move onto the next stage based on your own impression of your games and better judgment rather than the results per se. Of course if you are still at the stage where you drop pieces with one move blunders in 'sighted' games then trying to learn blindfold is a waste of your time, in which case the basic semi-blindfold would give you some small taste of what full blindfold is like - but you'd be better off spending your time studying basic tactics.

Although today marked another loss under 'stage iii' conditions I was generally very pleased with the game... and I found the way I lost unexpected, elegant, and quite funny. I had decided that if I got White I would play a gambit line such as the King's Gambit rather than my recent English openings, but with the Black pieces against 1.e4 I stuck to my standard Caro-Kann.

Play online chess

Although the game was not incredibly complicated the level of concentration you need in blindfold is very high, and after we had been playing a bit over an hour I had managed to get a slight headache - it was similar to how I had felt after playing a tournament game for about two and a half hours. Blindfold is really quite draining.

...Kc5?? Rc6#!!

Now that is a difficult move to anticipate blindfold...I definately wasn't looking out for checkmates at that stage in the game. Such an elegant and unexpected checkmate made the loss easier to bear - I'm happy with 47 of my 48 moves. I think I might as well go the whole hog now... next game will be full blindfold!