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Blindfold Opening Visualization: 100 Chess Puzzles
This is the second book in the series 'Blindfold Chess Visualization’'. The first book, 'Blindfold Endgame Visualization' is available on Amazon as well.
Blindfold chess training exercises with a focus on opening positions
This book will train and test your visualization skills through 100 well-selected positions. You will get a series of moves from common openings. The depth of the lines is from 4 to 10 moves.
You will not always have to find a killer tactic, but in some puzzles, you will just have to avoid a tactic and find a good move. You can use the look inside function and try the first puzzles.
Why This Book?
I have always been impressed by strong chess players' abilities to visualize the board without seeing it, firing off variations in the post mortem, or walking away from the board during a game while thinking about the position. As an adult trying to learn the game and improve I really want to be able to improve my ability to visualize. However, I soon discovered that there wasn't much training material available. To change this I have gone through hundreds of opening positions from real game positions to select the best positions for blindfold solving. You might ask yourself why should I spend time trying to visualize a position and calculate when I have the board to look at during the game.
Boris Gelfand said it pretty clearly in an interview on the Perpetual Podcast: “to save energy”. By straining your brain muscles now, you will be able to outlast your next opponent. I hope that the book will challenge you to stretch and strain your mind in the effort to solve these positions. Don’t be scared of failing as long as you put in the effort. You can also see it as a meditative exercise disconnecting from the outside world. Set aside a minimum amount of time you want to spend on each position. I will suggest 15 minutes. If you haven't solved it by then try to solve it by setting up a board and moving a couple of moves into the puzzle.
What do the experts say?
"Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.”― Cal Newport, Deep Work
"We played blindfold chess wherever we were—dancing, hiking, on buses and trains; wherever two of us happened to be, we would begin a blindfold game. All over Antwerp, people shook their heads at this babbling crew. A year later I was playing 16 games blindfold, which represented a new Belgian record. In 1924, while in the Belgian army, I played 20 at Naur, a sort of pay-off for having nothing to do but peel potatoes for two hours a day."
― George Koltanowski
"Playing blindfold, like it or not, you have to make your body work at full power, otherwise you risk losing your" orientation at the board"
― Vladimir Kramnik
This book is not a beginner's book but aimed at intermediate and expert players who want a challenge.
Blindfold chess training exercises with a focus on opening positions
This book will train and test your visualization skills through 100 well-selected positions. You will get a series of moves from common openings. The depth of the lines is from 4 to 10 moves.
You will not always have to find a killer tactic, but in some puzzles, you will just have to avoid a tactic and find a good move. You can use the look inside function and try the first puzzles.
Why This Book?
I have always been impressed by strong chess players' abilities to visualize the board without seeing it, firing off variations in the post mortem, or walking away from the board during a game while thinking about the position. As an adult trying to learn the game and improve I really want to be able to improve my ability to visualize. However, I soon discovered that there wasn't much training material available. To change this I have gone through hundreds of opening positions from real game positions to select the best positions for blindfold solving. You might ask yourself why should I spend time trying to visualize a position and calculate when I have the board to look at during the game.
Boris Gelfand said it pretty clearly in an interview on the Perpetual Podcast: “to save energy”. By straining your brain muscles now, you will be able to outlast your next opponent. I hope that the book will challenge you to stretch and strain your mind in the effort to solve these positions. Don’t be scared of failing as long as you put in the effort. You can also see it as a meditative exercise disconnecting from the outside world. Set aside a minimum amount of time you want to spend on each position. I will suggest 15 minutes. If you haven't solved it by then try to solve it by setting up a board and moving a couple of moves into the puzzle.
What do the experts say?
"Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.”― Cal Newport, Deep Work
"We played blindfold chess wherever we were—dancing, hiking, on buses and trains; wherever two of us happened to be, we would begin a blindfold game. All over Antwerp, people shook their heads at this babbling crew. A year later I was playing 16 games blindfold, which represented a new Belgian record. In 1924, while in the Belgian army, I played 20 at Naur, a sort of pay-off for having nothing to do but peel potatoes for two hours a day."
― George Koltanowski
"Playing blindfold, like it or not, you have to make your body work at full power, otherwise you risk losing your" orientation at the board"
― Vladimir Kramnik
This book is not a beginner's book but aimed at intermediate and expert players who want a challenge.
- GenresChess
217 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 27, 2021
36 people are currently reading
11 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 23, 2022
Visualizing move sequences is a core skill for chess players, and diligently working through this book will help intermediate players and above to improve their visualization skills. The openings are chosen from lichess, and therefore represent practical positions that commonly occur, which makes them ideal for practical players. Besides providing excellent practice in visualization, the course doubles as a course in avoiding/taking advantage of common opening trap themes. The author provides an excellent and helpful suggestion to those that find some of the positions difficult: Play the first few moves on a board so that you have fewer to visualize. In this way, one can gradually work up to longer visualization sequences. Highly recommended!
June 2, 2025
Blindfold Endgame Visualization was a great but this one is unfortunately terrible. The examples are from very weird opening sequences. The main criterion of inclusion seems to have been how often the correct move was missed in lichess db. Tactical motifs are very simple and repetitive e.g. the Nd3#/Nd6# idea happens like 3 times. Towards the end the examples become ridiculously difficult but with very little insights gained. Get the endgame book, you won't improve a lot from this one.
January 23, 2022
Great like always
Another great book from Martin, his books are always high quality, and with such a low price they are a bargain.
Solving blindfold puzzles in the shower is true chess optimization
Another great book from Martin, his books are always high quality, and with such a low price they are a bargain.
Solving blindfold puzzles in the shower is true chess optimization
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews