Launch Offer: -20% on Lifetime Pro €49 → €39Grab the deal
Memorize piece positions shown briefly, then recall them from memory. This exercise directly builds the mental muscle needed to hold a complete chess position in your mind during blindfold play.
Pro tip: Associate each piece with its square by creating a mental story.
Leaderboard
Want a fixed challenge? Try the dedicated intermediate and expert position memory drills.
About Position Memory
Building the mental board, one position at a time
A position appears for a few seconds, the board clears, and you rebuild it piece by piece. This is the entry point of the recall ladder, starting at 3 to 8 pieces, and it is where the abstract foundation work turns into something that looks like chess. Up to this point you have been training square names, colours, and piece paths in isolation. Here you have to hold several of them at once, which is the actual bottleneck in blindfold play.
What research on chess memory found is that strong players are not born with better memory, they encode differently. On random piece placements a grandmaster recalls barely more than a beginner. On positions from real games the gap is enormous, because the master stores meaning rather than coordinates: a castled king, a pawn chain, a battery on a file. Even at the easy tier it is worth practising that habit, naming what you see instead of reciting squares. When 8 pieces stop being a challenge, move up to the intermediate tier at 9 to 16 pieces, and then the expert tier. The method behind the ladder is in the chess memory training guide.