Blindfold Chess History, Psychology, Techniques...
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Blindfold chess was considered miraculous for centuries but now there is greater recognition of people who can keep track of more than one simultaneous blindfolded game.[1] In simultaneous blindfold play, an intermediary usually relays the moves between the players.
Paul Morphy held in 1858 a blindfold exhibition against the eight strongest players in Paris with the stunning result of six wins and two draws. Other early masters of blindfold chess were Louis Paulsen, Joseph Henry Blackburne (he played up to 16 simultaneous blindfold games), and the first world champion Wilhelm Steinitz, who in 1867 played six simultaneous blindfold games in Dundee, winning three and drawing three. It was seen by these masters as a good source of income. One of the first female players that is known for having played blindfold in the 1870s is Ellen Gilbert.[3]
As time went by the records for blindfold exhibitions increased. In 1900 Harry Nelson Pillsbury played 20 games simultaneously in Philadelphia; not long after attempting the unusual feat of playing 15 chess and 15 checkers games simultaneously (the record for blindfold checkers being 28 simultaneous games). The Czechoslovak player Richard Réti and Russian World Champion Alexander Alekhine were the next to significantly further the record.
The generally acknowledged world record that stood for the rest of the 20th century was set by George Koltanowski on 20 September 1937, in Edinburgh, who played 34 chess games simultaneously while blindfolded. He won 24 games and lost 10 over a period of 13 hours. The record was included in the Guinness Book of Records.[1] Later, both Miguel Najdorf and János Flesch claimed to have broken that record, but their efforts were not properly monitored the way that Koltanowski's was. Najdorf's first record in Rosario, Argentina was against 40 opponents, scoring 36 wins, 1 draw, and 3 losses.[5] and was organised in an effort to gain sufficient publicity to communicate to his family that he was still alive, as he had remained in Argentina after travelling from his native Poland to compete in the 1939 Chess Olympiad, during which German Invasion of Poland occurred. He increased this record to 45 opponents in São Paulo in 1947, with the result of 39 wins, 4 draws, and 2 losses.[6] The Guinness Book of Records does not acknowledge Najdorf's record, because he allegedly had access to the scoresheets, and there were multiple opponents per board.[1] Koltanowski claimed that he could have managed 100 games under those conditions.[7] However, Najdorf's record is considered legitimate by other sources.[8] Hungarian Janos Flesch claimed to have bettered this record in Budapest in 1960, playing 52 opponents with 31 wins, 3 draws, and 18 losses. However, this record attempt was somewhat sullied by the fact that Flesch was permitted to verbally recount the scores of the games in progress. It also took place over a remarkably short period of time, around five hours, and included many short games.[7]
While blindfold chess has been recommended in moderation by many sources as a method of increasing one's playing strength, simultaneous blindfold exhibitions were officially banned in 1930 in the USSR as they were deemed to be a health hazard.[1][13] Mikhail Botvinnik also warned against it.[1] Blindfold players have reported that it is more tiring than regular play, even if faster time controls are used.[1]
Given that it seems to require extraordinary visuo-spatial abilities and memory, this form of chess has led to considerable research in psychology, starting with the research of Alfred Binet in 1893, continuing with the work of chess grandmaster and psychoanalyst Reuben Fine in 1965, and culminating in the late 20th century with several scientific articles describing experiments on the psychology of blindfold chess.[14] In general, this research shows that the crucial attributes of blindfold chess players are their acquired knowledge and their ability to carry out visuo-spatial operations in the mind's eye.
Today there are Blindfold Chess Tournaments held throughout the year, with the highest profile event previously being the Melody Amber Tournament, held in Monte Carlo until 2011. Of the modern-day players, Vladimir Kramnik, Viswanathan Anand, Alexei Shirov, and Alexander Morozevich have proven themselves to be particularly strong at blindfold chess, being alternating winners of the Amber Tournaments between 1996 and 2007. Levon Aronian has won Amber three times since then and won the blindfold event at the 2012 SportAccord World Mind Games.
I forgot to mention. I have witness someone playing blindfold chess, and it was against me and under not-so-great surroundings as far as noise was concerned. He even won, which really didn't surprise me, since I usually only beat him one out of ten games. He was not a GM. His rating was 2000.
Photographic memory + analytical brain much I have semi-photographic memory, and I can visualize opening moves, even if they are moves I have not memorized. I can easily see more advanced players with similar memory play good blindfold chess. Playing several games at once is a different story, but that is probably from practice.
Really - notice how you look at the board next time. Do you look at the entire thing all at once No, your eye darts around to the different pieces. You don't focus on the entire board at once because that's not how the brain works. GMs also move their eyes up and down the board, sometimes they don't see a long range piece possibility because it's at the other side of the board just like a beginner... but of course in an extremely more complicated position. The point is that you don't have to see an entire 8x8 board at the same time and noone sees it like that. Interviews given by excellent blindfold players confirm this and go even further with almost none them saying they see a board like as if they were sighted, the most prevailing thing is that they just \"know\" it and they don't know how. Like how we know a bishop on c4 will hit f7, or a knight on e5 will hit c6. How do we know that stuff I think just study of games helps in this kind of knowledge. So most productive way to improve at it might be to just study sighted chess and it could just come naturally. There's no really good player who couldn't also play blindfold with a little thought.
The late Eliot Hearst, a United States Olympic Chess Team captain in 1962, was a U.S. Life Senior Master, a distinguished professor emeritus at Indiana University, and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Arizona.John Knott has written numerous legal articles and is a consultant at the London head office of an international law firm. Each author has had a particular interest in blindfold chess and has studied the subject for more than thirty years. Visit their website at www.blindfoldchess.net.
Hearst did his graduate work at Columbia University under Professor W.N. Schoenfeld and then achieved prominence once again but this time as a behavior researcher (Hearst, 1979, 1988; Hearst, Besley & Farthing, 1970; Hearst & Jenkins, 1974) while a professor at the University of Missouri, Indiana University, The University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, and The University of Arizona. The other author, John Knott, is a lifelong researcher and prominent authority on blindfold chess.1
The book clearly stands as the definitive compendium on the topic of blindfold chess. Chess players have already expressed admiration for the depth of its scholarship,2 including the authors' painstaking and masterful analysis of some 444 historically significant blindfold chess games, and psychologically flavored biographical sketches of history's greatest blindfold chess masters.
The Proficiency measure can also be used to investigate experimentally some of the claims and hypotheses cited by Hearst and Knott. For instance, is the chess masters' claim that their blindfold play is as strong as their sighted play matched by a corresponding similarity in their blindfold and sighted Proficiency scores
Section One of this article is an assessment of Blindfold Chess by Eliot Hearst and John Knott (Jefferson, 2009) which we contributed to ChessBase in 2009. Section Two lists alphabetically various blindfold specialists whose exploits have been covered in Chess Notes over the past 40 years, with particular emphasis on lesser-known material. Section Three comprises a miscellany of other items related to blindfold chess.
Part II (pages 149-204) deals with The Psychology of Blindfold Chess, broken down as follows: Research on General Chess Skill, Psychological Studies and Commentaries on Blindfold Chess, The Techniques of Blindfold Champions, and The Supposed Health Hazards. Here, the points discussed include recognition of patterns, mental imagery and the role of memory, with commentaries on blindfold chess by Binet, Bergson, Fine and others. The book suggests that health risks imputed to playing blindfold chess have been much exaggerated.
Eliot Hearst informs us that the extensive volume on blindfold chess (including historical and psychological aspects) that he is writing jointly with John Knott is nearing completion, and here he raises two questions:
In 1894, Binet had done a series of experiments to see how well chess players played when blindfolded. He was interested in the cognitive faculties of chess masters and thought that master chess depended upon the phenomenological qualities of visual memory (photographic memory). He found that only chess masters were able to play chess successfully without seeing the board and intermediate players found it impossible to play a game of blindfold chess. Binet argued that an amateur chess player could never play blindfold chess, no matter how good his memory was. Binet concluded that the memory proposed by the master varied in different mnemonic forms (techniques used to retain information into a form the brain can understand better). 59ce067264