Reddit mentions of Blindfold Chess: History, Psychology, Techniques, Champions, World Records, and Important Games

"The blonde plays well and the brunette plays badly, and no lectures will change this state of affairs" - Ostap Bender

On a more serious note, read this about Richard Réti

In the year before he died Réti published an article (Rotterdamsch Schaacknieuws, April
1928) on how he trained himself to play blindfold chess as a youngster and how important
he thought this practice was in transforming him fairly rapidly from a mediocre 16-year-old
amateur into a far stronger player. He notes at the beginning of his article that non-chess-
players and even very weak players usually view blindfold chess as something akin to black
magic. Obviously this is not a true depiction, he continues, by pointing out that every great
master can play a game blindfolded and that, in his opinion, there is hardly any difference
between blindfold and regular chess. He says that most masters develop this ability as a con-
sequence of their chess knowledge and are often surprised that they can play blindfolded
without much effort.

However, he argues that it would be preferable to learn how to play without sight of the board
at a beginning stage in the development of chess skill. He believes that the methods he used early
in his mastery of chess ought to be more widely adopted and publicized, and that any rea-
sonably intelligent person can learn to play a game blindfolded in a relatively few weeks,
giving the person a boost of confidence and immediate evidence that he is improving at the
game.

He then describes the methods he used, which were indirectly inspired by his first
observation of a blindfold player in action. (Top-notch blindfold champions like Blackburne,
Alekhine, and Koltanowski, among others, were also impressed at an early age by witness-
ing blindfold play.) Réti found that simply trying to play blindfolded did not work for him:
He would make illegal moves and forget that certain pieces had already been captured and
were no longer on the board. He always wrote down his moves so that he could check them
later on a regular board. Although only 16 years old, he devised a system of his own, which
he says raised him within a few months from a rather weak player to a top-class player in
regular chess.

Looking at a regular board, he took careful note of the relations between different
squares, the locations and numbers of squares on long and short diagonals, and the points
of their intersections. As he had read somewhere, he mentally divided the chessboard into
four small quadrants and studied their separate features individually and in relation to each
other. Then he tried to visualize the whole board, especially of course the colors of different
squares (light or dark), and the points of intersection of different diagonals, columns and
rows. He then mentally added pieces, one at a time, and visualized the squares they con-
trolled from different locations. He practiced, for example, with a Black and White piece
placed anywhere on his mental chessboard and tested his ability to determine how either
could be moved so as to attack the other, at first always checking his accuracy afterwards on
a regular board. Then he worked with simple endgames, for example checkmating the Black
king with White’s rook and king from many different starting positions on the chessboard
in his mind.

Réti mentally added more and more pieces until eventually he reached the actual start-
ing position in a real game. Whenever he played a regular game, he kept score and after-
wards tried to play over the game mentally. Then he studied different openings, with and
without an actual chessboard, and finally complete games from books. He claimed that he
learned much more from all this kind of practice, about two hours a day for two to three
months, than he would have gained from playing or studying regular games for years. He had
become a very strong player.

Source: Hearst, Eliot, and John Knott. Blindfold chess: History, psychology, techniques, champions, world records, and important games. McFarland, 2009, 65-66