This was the last week of the chess skill building project. The initial idea for my last lesson with Andrea was to play a couple of blitz games and then analyze them together. We did that, but decided to added something else: we would play the games without seeing the pieces (blindfold chess). There’s a setting on Lichess which lets you hide your pieces. You just need to go to Settings > Blindfold Chess (at the moment, you can find that all the way down in the setting’s page). It was a fun challenge, but very demanding at an intellectual level. Actually, it’s not recommended at all to play like this often.
To my surprise, in the blindfold games, I did much better than I thought I would. We played common openings, but Andrea tried to take me out of the books very early in the games so that I wouldn’t play automatically. I think having a good grasp of the coordinate pairs on the board (the name of the files, designated by letters from a to h, and the ranks, designated by numbers from 1 to 8) is essential to think your way through a game of this kind. Keeping in mind the pawn structures (your own and the adversaries’), as mentioned by Andrea, is also key to remember what moves are possible or not.
[Read more…] about Chess in Italian (Week 12) Playing Blindfold Chess