Visualisation

I played my sixth blindfold game today, and decided to try to pay particular attention to how I was seeing the position. The game was fairly quiet which makes things a bit easier to explain, and I have attempted to do so via images below. Firstly however I'll include todays game with brief annotation.

Play chess online

Not a flawless game (e.g. missing 12...Bxe2), but I'm quite pleased with my play over all.

So how do you visualise the position in blindfold? In general it's not hugely difficult to remember where everything is, especially in quiet positions, but seeing how it all interacts is the important bit. You want to be looking at patterns, important squares and lines of piece activity, rather than imaging the position as a static arrangement of symbols.

I've tried to explain my impression of the process of visualising the position blindfold in the images below, which are taken from the position after 12...0-0 in the game above. I originally animated these images in a .gif, but it will not display properly on this site. Please visit here to see the .gif animated (a version without editing can be found here).















I find that I have to recreate the position almost from scratch following this process every few moves, or after any significant change in structure or piece placement. Of course the process outlined above is a somewhat idealised version of the truth because during the game it feels a bit like a jigsaw. You can only see a certain amount of the 'big picture' at any one time - the spotlight of attention. In some positions this isn't a big issue, where as in others it may cause a lot of trouble - which is of course compounded by any failures of recollection.