Villainous and Heroic Chess

Since the last entry I have played two further blindfold games. I approached the first of these two games with the wrong attitude and insufficient motivation, which generally spells disaster in chess, doubly so when blindfold.


In the above position my opponent played the interesting 21...Bb6!?. Play continued 22. Rxb7 ...Bxe3+ 23. Kh1 ...Nxe4 24. Rc7 ...Rxc7 25. Nxc7 ...Rc8 26. Na6 ...Nf2+, leading to the position below.


Unfortunately during this I lost touch with the position in my head and could no longer visualise it or remember what was happening, and so for the first time mid-game I switched the game board back to 'sighted'. I had meant this to only be for a glance but it seems that switching from a position you have seen back to blindfold isn't very easy - it's better to play it blindfold from the start. I won this game in the end, but as I played the latter part of the game 'sighted' I'm pretty disappointed in it.

I played the second game with a bloody gauze clamped between my teeth and no feeling in my face while blindfold (re: dental treatment), truly a heroic way to play chess! No chess master wants sensation in their face during a game anyway, it would just be distracting...

The game was a Caro-Kann against a relatively lower rated opponent, and in this case I approached the game with the right level of concentration. Despite that I made a fairly trivial blunder, as seen in the position below.

I played 12...Qb6 aware of the tactical problems in the centre, but expecting the move to come with check, giving me a tempo to resolve these issues. Unfortunately it didn't come with check (I didn't account for the d pawn?), meaning that the simple 13.Nxd7 wins a piece. My opponent didn't see this however, and later blundered away their queen for a rook giving me the win.

I have started to play 'sighted' games at standard time controls again now. I'm not sure whether my rating will improve much above what it was a couple of months back, but it gets a bit unpleasent having too many poor quality or dull games, as blindfold can lead to. That and you have to have 100% concentration for blindfold. It's too early to tell whether there has been improvement, but even if there hasn't I won't view this all as a waste of time, as it was quite an interesting challenge. I will still be continuing to play blindfold and make entrys here, but blindfold will probably now only make up a significant minority of my games.