"It may be, in blindfold play, more than in other forms of training, that dynamic qualities of thinking and attention are most easily improved. The nature of the game presupposes the need for a constant, accurate comparison of past images with the present position. This demands systematic control and the application of willpower to overcome distraction. It is particularly important not to let the exact positioning of pieces slip from one's mind, and such sluggishness and indifference are incompatible with blindfold play."

Grandmaster Nikolai Krogius, 1976

Sometimes I think I went about this business backwards. I had a technique before I had any idea why it worked.

Standard wisdom would be to start a business in an area you're already an expert in. I was a rank amateur. I'd barely started playing Chess.

All I had was an unorthodox blindfold training technique and some encouraging results. I had absolutely no idea why it worked. And I was terrified.

It felt like luck that I had found the technique in the first place.

I love trying to deconstruct skills and learn them faster than you're "meant to". So I went looking for the most critical skills of Chess, the 80/20 of the game.

I found a video from a Grandmaster, sadly I don't remember who, saying that visualization was the most important skill for a player to develop. (A year or two later Fabiano Caruana said the same thing in an interview. And I've heard it from others since as well.)

That made intuitive sense to me at the time. Seeing the future clearly would help a lot with my game. If visualization was so important, I decided it would be worth focusing on for a while.

The general attitude toward visualization training seemed to be that you develop the skill by doing other things. I once saw a Gothamchess stream where he said you "just learn visualization by playing thousands of games".

Sure, that would work, but there's gotta be a more efficient way for something this important, right?

Then I found a video from Hikaru. Unfortunately I can't find this video anymore either.

(If I'd thought for even a second that I would be writing about these moments for the next 5+ years, I would have bookmarked a few things!)

Hikaru suggested blindfold Chess as the best way to train visualization. I had to try it.

If I'm honest, part of me doubted blindfold training would do much. It seemed fundamentally different to regular Chess. Could playing a game without seeing the board really help me to play one when I could?

But I went at it with an open mind anyway.

I did very badly, as you'd expect. Playing an entire game blindfolded was too much for me, but all I really wanted to do was train the visualization bit. Having to make decisions was getting in the way of that goal, so I removed the decisions.

I went looking for audio recordings of Chess games. It seemed like the logical next step to me. I couldn't find anything, so I just made them myself.

I read the moves from a game out loud into the Voice Memos app on my phone. Then I listened back to them with my eyes closed, pausing and repeating as often as I needed to. Trying to understand what was going on.

I did it for about 15 minutes, and managed to reach move 7 in the game by the end.

I remember thinking, "well, that was fun". I was proud my brain had done it. But I figured it was a fun diversion at best. I didn't feel I'd done anything applicable to my regular Chess.

Blindfold work felt too different. Much of that 15 minutes was spent working out obvious things my eyes would normally just see with no effort.

Blindfold was fun, sure. But I didn't expect it would help.

Then something happened that I'm very thankful happened.

Immediately after the blindfold work, I decided to play some normal sighted games — and my brain just started giving me stuff.

I saw my opponent's mistakes from a mile away, patterns jumped off the board at me, I didn't hang my pieces. It felt effortless.

As a Don't Move member described it years later, I felt like I could see the Matrix code.

But was it really the blindfold training that did it? Or did I just have a lucky streak?

Encouraged and curious, I started adding 15 minutes of blindfold work to the start of every Chess session. I changed very little else about my training.

Over the next 2 weeks I jumped 250 rating points. In the 4 weeks after that, I jumped another 250 points. Then my friend had a similar improvement with the same recordings.

So maybe I had stumbled into a legitimate training technique. How valuable it was, I didn't know. But I decided to see where it could go. I started Don't Move Until You See It on my mother's birthday in 2021.

I got my first member in the first 24 hours. More followed soon after. And their results were encouraging.

But I have to admit that, while I'd had some great results, I didn't have any idea why blindfold training worked.

Blindfold Chess and sighted Chess still felt like different things when I was doing them. What could possibly be happening to cause the results I was seeing?

I'll admit I was scared to look into it for a while.

I was afraid the results I'd gotten myself or I was seeing from others were more about luck than the technique. If I looked too closely, perhaps I would find things to disprove my entire approach.

Then there was the imposter layer. Who was I to contend with the combined canon of hundreds of years of Chess training wisdom?

I'm no psychologist or neuroscientist. I'm a musician, Star Trek geek, and personal development nut. What the heck do I know about this stuff?

But I pushed through, eager to learn whether this butterfly I could see was as beautiful as I hoped or just a bunch of random ink blots.

I found some glowing testimonials for blindfold training. GM Susan Polgar credited it with giving her a "broader scope of imagination" in her Chess. GM George Koltanowski believed blindfold training "improves one's regular game more than does studying books".

But I also found scathing takedowns all over the internet. People calling blindfold a waste of time and energy. Wild theories that blindfold play can drive you mad or is bad for your health.

I found a complicated and rich history of blindfold work and brain studies, flowing just under the surface of the Chess world.

My research led me to chunking theory, war-time simuls, yellow briefcases, invisible gorillas, Batman, and aphantasia, and many other weird and wacky and wonderful things.

And I write this now with an actual understanding of this technique I stumbled upon five years ago. No longer afraid that I might find something to disprove it.

I can see how it connects. But I don't think I've done a good enough job communicating how it connects.

In this series, I'm going to take you on the same journey I went on to discover how and why this blindfold stuff works for our regular Chess.

I'm expecting it to be 5 parts, going through each of the key stages, the "chunks" shall we say, of my research.

By the end, you'll have a thorough answer to the simple but oh-so-complex question I'm sure you've wondered:

Why blindfold?

The best answer I had in 2021 was, "because it works".

I can do better now.

I'll see you in Part 2.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden