Blindfold Chess

Play it, and train the sight that makes it possible

Blindfold chess is a normal game of chess played without seeing the pieces. The rules do not change and neither does the position — only the place you keep it. Nox Chess is a site built around that one idea: four ways of seeing a board, a free course that takes you from naming a square to playing a whole game in your head, drills and puzzles for the skill underneath it, and real opponents to use it against.

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What is blindfold chess?

In blindfold chess the players are given no view of the position. Moves are spoken or written in notation, each side updates the board in memory, and the game is decided by exactly the same rules as any other — checkmate, the clock, resignation, a draw. The blindfold in the name is historical. Almost nobody wears one; the player simply has nothing to look at, or an empty board, which amounts to the same thing.

What makes it hard is not the calculation. It is the bookkeeping. In an ordinary game the board does that work for you: it remembers that your bishop went to b5 eleven moves ago, that the h-pawn is still at home, that the square in front of the king is dark. Take the board away and every one of those facts becomes something you are personally responsible for, and they accumulate for as long as the game lasts.

That is also why it is worth practising. The position a blindfold player holds is the same thing a sighted player has to hold at the end of a long variation, six moves deep, when the board on the table is showing a position that no longer exists. Blindfold chess is that skill with nothing else attached to it.

How blindfold chess works

A blindfold game runs on notation. Squares are named by file and rank — e4, f6, h1 — and moves by the piece and where it lands: Nf3, Bxc6, O-O, e8=Q. Nothing else is said. Both players are trusted to have the same position, and the moment they do not, the game falls apart — which is why an online game is refereed: an illegal move is refused instead of played, and the refusal tells you something has come loose.

What an experienced player keeps is not a picture of sixty-four squares. It is a small number of facts that generate the picture on demand:

• The pawn structure, which changes rarely and anchors everything else.
• Where each piece stands and what it is doing — not "rook on d1" so much as "rook on the open file, aimed at d7".
• The colour of the key squares. A bishop's whole life is one colour, and knowing that f6 is dark is faster than working it out.
• The last few moves, which is where mistakes live: a piece you moved recently is the one you are most likely to still be imagining on its old square.

The things that go first are predictable. A piece that has not moved all game quietly disappears from your mental board. A bishop's long diagonal stops at a pawn you have forgotten is there. A pawn capture changes a file and you keep counting the old one. Every drill worth doing is aimed at one of those.

Four ways of seeing the same game

Going from a full board to no board at all in one step is how most people bounce off blindfold chess. Nox puts three intermediate stages between them, and they are real game modes rather than training wheels — you can play ranked games in any of them, each with its own rating.

How to play blindfold chess online

Playing without a board needs three things that a physical set does not give you: an opponent who is doing the same thing, a way of entering a move that is not pointing at a square, and something that knows the rules well enough to refuse an impossible move. All three are why this works better online than across a table.

On Nox the order is: pick how you want to see the board, then pick who you are playing.

1. Choose a vision. Complete Blindfold, Board Only or Fog of War — or Sighted, if you want the ordinary game. This is one setting, and it changes nothing about the rules.
2. Choose an opponent. A bot, at whatever strength suits you, available instantly. A friendly game in an open room against whoever is waiting. A ranked game, matched by time control, with a separate ladder for each vision. Or a direct challenge to a friend.
3. Play. In Complete Blindfold you type the moves. In the other visions you click the board as usual — there is simply less of it drawn. The clock runs the way it does in any game.
4. Look at what happened. When the game ends, Study Board runs the whole thing through an engine and marks every move, with the reason it was good or bad written out. Replaying your own blindfold game with the pieces visible is where most of the learning is.

Moves are read in standard algebraic notation or plain coordinates, whichever you are used to — Nf3 and g1f3 are the same move, and capitalisation is forgiven. Castling, promotion, en passant and the disambiguated forms (Nbd2, R1e2) are all accepted. If two pieces could legally go to the square you named, you are told so rather than having one of them chosen for you.

An account is free, and you do not need one to play a bot or a friendly game. Ranked games, puzzles and the friends list do need one, so that a rating and a place in a ladder belong to somebody.

How to train blindfold chess visualization

Visualization is not one skill and it does not improve by playing blindfold games badly. It comes apart into a handful of smaller abilities, each of which can be drilled on its own, and they stack in a particular order. This is the order the Nox course and the practice drills follow.

1. Know the board without looking at it

Every square by name, and the colour of every square, instantly. This sounds trivial and is the single most common thing missing. If you have to count across from a1 to work out where f6 is, that arithmetic is running during every move of a blindfold game and there is no attention left for the chess. The Coordinate Trainer asks the question in both directions — name the square, and find the square — from both sides of the board.

2. See where a piece reaches

Given a piece on a named square, list everywhere it can go, with nothing in front of you. A knight on d4 is the classic: eight squares, and most people can find six. Then the same with other men in the way, which is where a bishop's diagonal running into a pawn stops being a surprise.

3. Follow a piece through moves you never see

A short sequence is played and you say where things ended up. This is the first drill that exercises updating rather than reading, and updating is what a real game is made of. Start at two or three moves; it gets hard faster than you expect.

4. Answer questions about a position you cannot see

Is that pawn defended? Is the king in check? What would happen if the rook took on d7? These ask you to hold a whole position rather than one piece, which is the step from remembering moves to remembering a board.

5. Play, with the board taken away gradually

Fog of War first, where your own men are still drawn and only the opponent's are missing. Then Board Only, where the squares are there and nothing else is. Then Complete Blindfold. Each step removes one kind of help, and you should be comfortable at one before taking the next.

Blindfold chess exercises and puzzles

A puzzle asks for the best move. A blindfold puzzle asks for the best move in a position you have to build for yourself first, and that second thing is the exercise. Nox's puzzles can be opened in any of the visions: the written position is there, the rules are refereeing, and you find the move.

• Puzzle ladders, in every vision, rated and unlocked in order, so the difficulty tracks what you can actually do rather than where you started.
• Puzzle Rush, a timed run through as many as you can solve, which is a different test: recall under a clock.
• A daily puzzle for each vision, the same one for everybody, rotating on a fixed clock.
• Practice drills — the coordinate, piece-vision, tracking and hidden-position exercises described above, plus a Mini Blindfold Challenge to finish on. These are deliberately unrated: they are a level you climb by turning up and by trying different drills, and grinding one of them does not move it.

Every puzzle comes with the reason it worked, written from the engine's own analysis of that exact position and the line that follows it — not a generic label. Where nothing can be justified, the card says less rather than inventing a motif, which is the difference between a puzzle set you can trust and one you cannot.

How Nox Chess helps you practice

Nox is not a normal chess site with a blindfold option bolted on. The hiding is the design: one game, one set of rules, and a setting that decides how much of it you are shown. That is why a puzzle, a lesson, a drill and a ranked game all behave identically in every vision.

And around them

• A free five-lesson course — Learn the Board, Chess Notation, Visualize Pieces, Track the Position, First Blindfold Challenge. Three of the five generate their questions fresh every time, so the course cannot be memorised, only learnt.
• Practice drills with a level that rewards range rather than repetition, and progress that is kept as you go.
• Puzzles in every vision, plus a timed rush and a daily.
• Ranked play with four separate ladders, one per vision, because being good at Fog of War is not the same as being good blindfolded.
• Friendly games, rooms and direct challenges, with a link you can send to somebody who has never been here.
• Study Board — every move of a finished game marked, with the engine's line, the swing in winning chances, and the idea behind the position named where it can be named honestly.

Common questions