This is a good place to bring up an excellent training tool. Your thoughts during a chess game will be filled with looking at possible sequences of moves in your head while an actual position is before you. Getting better at chess is at least partially based on your ability to see these sequences farther into the game. Improvement is also dependent upon seeing these sequences more clearly in your head.

Therefore, an attempt to stretch out that ability should be an excellent exercise. So what could be better than an attempt to play an entire game without looking at a board or pieces?

Too Difficult!

If you think this exercise is a bit too difficult for one who has just begun trying to understand what chess is all about, you're right. Don't expect to complete a whole game on your first try. And don't expect to play very well either. Neither completing the game nor playing well are the goal at this point.

The Goal

Trying to get as far as you can while playing as well as you can is what stretches your imaginative capacity. After working on it, perhaps with numerous tries, you may eventually complete an entire game or play a reasonably error-free series of moves. But that really doesn't matter.

What matters is that you will improve your look-ahead ability with this exercise, and you will begin to see series of moves in your games a bit deeper and with more clarity. And that is the real goal of this blindfold exercise.

Every year in Monte Carlo, Monaco, a special tournament takes place among many of the world's leading grandmasters. Melody-Amber is a series of two tournaments, in which the grandmasters compete with each other in rapid chess and in blindfold rapid. That last is what makes this event unique. The players get to see a chessboard, but they have no pieces, and must key in their moves via computer.