I wrote a post last year about my father’s professional chess career in the ’50s and ’60s and his connection to Bobby Fischer. At the end of that post, I mentioned that he’s spent many years working on a big, definitive book about blindfold chess—the art of playing without sight of the board or the pieces. It’s an extraordinary intellectual feat that has a long, colorful history, and it’s deeply related to my father’s other main lifelong interest, psychology. (He retired from Indiana University in the mid-’90s after many years as a distinguished professor of psychology.) The book, which my father wrote with a co-author, John Knott, is now in the final stages of publication, and it should be out by the end of the year. I’ve designed a teaser site, blindfoldchess.net, that features a summary of the book and links where you can preorder a copy. I pushed the site live yesterday. Check it out.
When the book comes out, I’ll be posting an in-depth Q&A with my father about the rich intellectual and psychological history of this amazing skill.
Here’s a reprint of the book summary from the site:
During the 18th century, when Philidor played two blindfold games of chess simultaneously, eyewitnesses were asked to swear affidavits attesting to this remarkable feat. Since then, blindfold chess—the art of playing without sight of the board or pieces—has produced some of the greatest feats of human memory, progressing to the extent that the world record is 45 simultaneous blindfold games.
This work provides the first extensive coverage of blindfold chess from its earliest known instances through the present day. It describes the personalities and achievements of some of blindfold chess’s greatest players—including Paulsen, Morphy, Blackburne, Zukertort, Pillsbury, Réti, Alekhine, Koltanowski, Najdorf and Fine, as well as present-day grandmasters such as Anand, Kramnik and Morozevich, who play in regular tournaments with all players blindfolded. Including some never before published, 444 games scores are presented, peppered with diagrams and annotations. Hints for playing blindfold chess, the benefits of playing blindfold, and a readable summary of psychological research on blindfold chess ability are also included. Appendices offer a chronology of world-record simultaneous blindfold performances since the 18th century, and proposed rules for serious simultaneous blindfold play.
This book will be of interest to psychologists, historians, people interested in great feats of memory, and, of course, chess players.
