♞Reflex Chess

Blindfold chess trainer

Visualization is the skill the rest of chess sits on, and it is the one thing you cannot practise with a board in front of you. This trainer takes the board away in three stages, so you can start somewhere you are able to hold the position and work up from there.

Start where you can actually see it

Almost everyone who tries blindfold training quits in the first five minutes, and almost always for the same reason: they start with a real middlegame. Twenty-four pieces is not a harder version of the exercise, it is a different exercise, and failing at it teaches you nothing except that you cannot do it.

So difficulty here is how many pieces are on the board, not how hard the puzzle is. Those are genuinely different things. A four-piece rook ending rated 2400 is comfortable to hold and hard to solve. A twenty-six-piece position rated 900 is easy to solve and, if you cannot see it, close to impossible to even build. Puzzle ratings measure the second question and say nothing at all about the first, which is why every band here is a piece count and the rating is only printed afterwards, as a label.

The three settings take the board away by degrees:

That last point is deliberate and it is the main design decision on this page. The piece list does not disappear. If it did, this would be a memory drill, and memory is not the skill: a strong player who forgets where the rook was can simply look at the list again and carry on calculating. What is being trained is turning a description into a board in your head and then moving pieces on it, which is exactly what you do when you calculate a variation over a real board that is sitting right in front of you.

What blindfold work does for your game

Nothing in a real game is played with the pieces where you are looking at them. When you calculate four moves deep, the position you are judging at the end of the line is invisible: the physical board in front of you is showing you the position four moves ago, and it actively fights you. Every player who has moved a bishop in their head and then seen it sitting on its old square has met the problem. Blindfold work is practice at exactly that, with the interference removed.

The second thing it does is cheaper and more immediate: it kills the habit of solving puzzles by pushing pieces around until something works. That habit is invisible on a screen, because dragging a piece and taking it back costs nothing and feels like thinking. It does not survive a position you cannot see, and losing it is worth more than any single tactical pattern.

The third is square names. Most improving players know the board well enough to read a diagram and not well enough to place f6 without counting. Working blind fixes that within a few sessions because there is nothing else to hold on to.

How to practise it without burning out

Blindfold work is expensive in concentration and cheap in time, which is the opposite of how most people schedule it. Five to fifteen minutes of genuine effort beats an hour of drifting, and the drop-off when you are tired is steep rather than gradual. Two or three positions properly held is a good session.

Raise one thing at a time. If you move up a band and take the board away in the same sitting, you have changed two variables and you will not know which one broke. The order that works is: get comfortable in Follow at a piece count, hide the board at the same piece count, then and only then add pieces.

Use the reveal. It is on the page on purpose, it costs your streak and the position does not count as solved, and that is the whole cost. Sitting in front of an invisible position you have lost, refusing to look, is not training. Look, see what you had wrong, and take the next one. The one thing worth resisting is revealing before you have made a real attempt, because the attempt is the part that does the work.

Say the moves out loud if you are somewhere you can. Most people hold a position better when they name it, and the naming is also what makes notation automatic.

What is actually known about it

Blindfold play is old and well documented. Philidor gave blindfold displays in London in the 1780s and contemporaries wrote about them as though they were barely credible. George Koltanowski played 34 games simultaneously without sight of any of them in Edinburgh in 1937, which stood as a record for years. Eliot Hearst and John Knott's Blindfold Chess (McFarland, 2009) is the serious reference if you want the history and the surviving accounts of how the players say they did it.

The psychology is better established than the training advice. Adriaan de Groot showed in the 1940s that masters shown a position from a real game for a few seconds could reconstruct it far more accurately than weaker players. William Chase and Herbert Simon then showed in 1973 that this advantage largely disappears when the pieces are arranged at random. The conclusion drawn from that pair of results, and it has held up, is that strong players are not storing twenty-four separate pieces. They are storing a much smaller number of familiar structures, and each structure carries several pieces with it.

That matters for how you practise, because it says the thing that grows is not memory capacity. It is your stock of positions that mean something. A castled king with three pawns in front of it is one item to a strong player and eight items to a beginner, which is the entire difference. It is also why training on real positions from real games is worth more than training on random arrangements: only one of the two is made of the structures you are trying to learn.

What nobody can give you honestly is a number. There is no study I can point to that measures how many rating points blindfold training is worth, and any figure you see quoted for it has been invented. The case for doing it is that it is the same act as calculating, practised directly, and that the strong players who write about their own training almost all describe doing some version of it.

Questions people ask

What is blindfold chess?

Chess played without sight of the board. The moves are given in notation and each player keeps the position in their head. Nobody is actually blindfolded. The name comes from nineteenth century exhibitions, where the player sat with their back to the room.

Can anyone learn to play blindfold chess?

Most club players can hold a simple position after some practice. It is a trained skill rather than a gift, and it builds from small positions upward: four pieces first, then eight, then a full board. Starting with a full middlegame is the usual reason people decide they cannot do it.

How do I start if I cannot hold a position at all?

Start with four to seven pieces and with the board still in front of you, and only update one move in your head. That is the Follow setting above. When one move is comfortable, hide the board and keep the piece count the same. Raise the piece count last, not first.

Does blindfold training make you better at normal chess?

The practical case is strong: calculating a variation over the board is the same act of holding a position you cannot see, so training it directly trains what you do in a real game. What nobody can honestly give you is a number of rating points. There is no study that measures that, and anyone quoting a figure is guessing.

How long should a blindfold session be?

Short. Five to fifteen minutes of real concentration is worth more than an hour of drifting, and the quality drops off sharply once you are tired. Two or three positions a day, held properly, beats twenty rushed ones.

Is blindfold chess bad for you?

Blindfold displays have a long reputation for being exhausting, and the players who set the records described them that way. There is no good evidence that ordinary practice does any harm. The real limit is concentration, which runs out long before anything else does.

Where do these positions come from?

They are real positions from real games, taken from the Lichess puzzle database, which is released under CC0. Every one of them has been replayed through the same rules engine the app uses, so the move you are asked for is checked to be legal and to be the puzzle's actual solution rather than the opponent's preceding mistake.

Where to go next

Blindfold work goes best alongside ordinary pattern work, because the patterns are what you end up holding. These are the places to get them: