historical blindfold games, current events and videos

Nothing quite like playing bullet chess while blindfolded.  Love to see the guys pushing the envelope!

Seems like a ton of today’s youtubers have picked up blindfold chess play as a new piece of content for their channels. Lucky us!  Here’s one of the chessbrahs Aman Hambleton having a go. Enjoy..

This has to be pushing one of the boundaries of what’s possible on blindfold.  Not exactly high quality games, but impressive nonetheless!

It’s been a while, but noirchess is back and better than ever.  We’ve brought the web app in-line with the latest iOS and Android versions of the apps available in the app stores, and made some other improvements to the infrastructure of the site. Please let us know if you see any problems, and we hope you enjoy the new features!

Fun to see the world champ.

Let’s take a trip in the way-back machine to look at a game played between two legends. Here Morphy takes down Paulsen in a very complicated King’s Knight game. Paulsen ends up giving up his Queen for 2 rooks, but Morphy masterfully gobbles up pawns and overwhelms his opponent with pushed passed pawns.

Looking forward to the day that I can play a 54 move game blindfolded!

In honor of the legend Viktor Korchnoi, who is playing this week in Zurich, let’s look back at a few of his blindfold games from 1994. Here he grinds down a young Judit Polgar in a queen’s indian gone right for white. Polgar actually achieved the advantage after 21 .. g4, with her king side attack coming faster, but gave up the advantage after the inaccuracy on move 26. Taking with the h pawn would have left more dynamic tension around the white king. White’s queen side domination eventually was decisive, and Polgar resigned.

So, after that nice victory, let’s look at a less flattering game from his fairly poor performance that year. Here Korchnoi makes a horrible blindfold blunder playing against another legend, Gata Kamsky, and hangs his queen on move 20. Yes, even the player known as “the strongest player to never be World Champion” can hang his queen, so we definitely shouldn’t feel so bad if/when we do the same!

Congratulations to American Hikaru Nakamura who managed to hold on and win in the Tradwise Gibralter Chess Tournament.  As we do, let’s post one of his past blindfold games, this time against super GM Vassily Ivanchuk.  Here Nakamura as black keeps up the pressure, establishing a monster Knight on g2 before trapping a white piece in the closed position, forcing the resignation.

In honor of Kramnik’s domination over Nakamura’s Kind’s Indian Defense, and his press conference afterwards where he indicated that he feels the defense is basically unsound, let’s take a look at a micro he played at the Amber Blindfold ternament way back in 2001. I wouldn’t use this game as proof that the KID is flawed, but it does make a amateur blindfold player feel better about his blindfold blunders.. it even happens to 2700+ players!