Blindfold Chess Book (Free PDF)

Blindfold Chess is a 54-page training book by FIDE Master Manuel López Michelone, with a foreword by International Master Guil Russek. It is not about exhibitions. It is about one practical question: can training without the board make you calculate better in your own tournament games? The author answers yes, and the English edition is free to download here.

What is inside the book

The book moves from history to method, from method to research, and from research to exercises you do without a board:

• A short history of blindfold play, with the record simultaneous exhibitions from Morphy's 8 boards in 1858 to Koltanowski's 56 in 1961
• Practical calculation methods from grandmasters and coaches: Kotov, Tisdall, Soltis, Beliavsky, the Swedish method and the Soviet school described by Slótnik
• Pattern recognition: typical checkmate patterns and middlegame combinations built on the distraction theme, with a Capablanca example
• What science says a blindfold player actually sees, from Alfred Binet in 1893 to Adriaan de Groot's experiments with Keres and the AVRO 1938 players
• A practical part: board visualization drills, opening positions to solve blind, games to follow move by move, and the solutions

The calculation methods, in short

The core of the book is a comparison of the ways strong players have trained calculation without moving the pieces. A few of them:

Kotov: stop where the variations begin

Take an annotated game, play through it until the critical moment, then cover the commentary and analyze every variation in your head, as if you were at the board in a tournament. Compare with the book afterwards.

Tisdall: firm steps

Calculate until the position starts to blur, then stop and rebuild it deliberately: which pieces have moved, where are they now. Once the picture is clear again, calculate from there. Tisdall also found it easier to follow a game by listening to the moves than by reading them.

Soltis: one whole game in your head

A move-by-move walk through Piket vs Anand (Amsterdam 1993) without a board. After each move you check the pawn structure first, then the pieces, one region of the board at a time. Soltis expects it to take at least half an hour.

Slótnik: the Soviet progression

IM Boris Slótnik lays out the stages coaches in the former USSR used, from board notation and piece movement to solving positions blind, replaying a full game and finally playing a blindfold game against the clock. The book includes his exercises at intermediate and advanced level.

What the research says a blindfold player sees

Binet set out to study blindfold play as a feat of memory and visualization. What he found rejected the idea of a photographic image of the board, and the book draws the conclusions that still hold today: a player does not see the whole board, does not see square colors, and remembers the relationships between the pieces rather than a picture of them. De Groot's reconstruction experiment points the same way: masters recall real positions far better than amateurs, but lose that edge when the pieces are placed at random.

That is good news for training. If the skill were a photographic gift, practice would not help. Because it is a vocabulary of patterns and relationships, it can be built.

How to use the book with DarkSquares

The author's advice is to practice every day, starting with one or two short games a day and building up gradually. Several of the book's practical exercises have a matching drill you can open next to them:

• Board visualization questions (what color is f8?) → Square Colors and Coordinates
• Solving positions with few pieces, first with an empty board as an aid, then fully blind → Blindfold Puzzles
• Replaying a game and reconstructing the final position → Position Memory
• Playing a full game blind, even with the moves spoken aloud → Blindfold play against Stockfish

Start with square colors and coordinates, move on to blindfold puzzles and position memory, and when you are ready, play a blindfold game against the computer. For the full progression, read how to play chess blindfolded.

About the author

Manuel López Michelone is a FIDE Master, a chess writer and a programmer. In his foreword, IM Guil Russek points to exactly that combination as what makes the book different: a player who also builds software, and who turns the theory into a training system you can follow. He also teaches chess on his Spanish-language YouTube channel, Manuel Morsa.

Frequently asked questions