[EricK]

As you all probably know, chess is normally played in full sight of the board, so that at any time both players know the location of all the pieces. "Blindfold chess" is a variant where one or both players play without sight of the board so have to keep track of the position in their head. Grandmasters occasionally give exhibitions where they play a number of blindfold games simultaneously - and their standard of play is generally not that far short of what it is in normal play. Most chess amateurs, on the other hand, are completely incapable of playing blindfold chess. Not only can they not keep track of the current position, but even if they could, they are not able to analyse that position nearly as well as they could if they were looking at it.

When you start a hand of bridge, you are in a worse position than the "sighted" chess player. You only know the location of some of the cards. However, as the experts always tell us, the key to success at bridge is to develop the ability to place the outstanding cards - by counting, drawing inferences from the bidding and so on. But even when you have done that, that only puts you in the position of the blindfold chess player. You theoretically know where all the cards are, but still have to hold all that information in your head and do the analysis purely mentally - without the constant visual reminder of the position which the sighted chess player has.

Now whereas I have seen a number of books and articles which explain how to go about placing the unseen cards, I have never seen anyone explain how to do the analysis of this purely imagined position. Is this because it is a skill which you either have or you haven't got? As far as I know, chess grandmasters never train themselves to be able to play blindfold - it's just something they discover they can do. And no doubt that ability helps them in their normal games (as deep analysis of a position will take you to positions where nearly all the pieces have moved).

I used to be a reasonably good chess player - although that was generally more via intuition and "feel" rather than concrete analysis - but if I tried to play blindfold I was pathetically bad. I just didn't have any sort of picture of where the pieces were. When playing with sight of the board I instinctively see what pieces are undefended; what is attacking what etc. But blindfolded I had nothing. And it's just the same when I play bridge. I know what I should be doing, but even when I make the deductions about how many cards people have in a suit, and who must have the ♦A etc, I don't have a sort of image in my mind which I can use to form a plan. If I could write it down and look at it, I'd be able to, but my mind doesn't seem to store the information in a way which is actually usable.

Does anybody else have this problem? Am I doomed to always be like this, or is there something I can do? If you don't have this problem have you always been able to do it - at least to some degree? Also, if you do have this skill, what form does the mental image you have take? Do you see it like a pack of cards, or an image on a screen, or a printed article - or is it nothing like that at all? And what happens to that image as you imagine a hypothetical line of play?

[barmar]

In both bridge and chess, the key to being able to play blindfolded is to learn patterns. You don't have to keep track of 52 cards, which is almost impossible for most people, you need to remember things like "the shape of my hand is 5332, spades are headed by KQ, etc.", and similarly for dummy. Even with your eyes open, you already have to do this for the unseen hands, building up a picture in your mind as the bidding and play progress.

You might think that in chess this wouldn't be as easy. But studies have shown that chess grandmasters think this way. If you ask them to solve chess problems that involve positions that would never be reached in a real chess game, they have a hard time. Their brain is obviously full of all the realistic chess positions that they've learned, and they're doing pattern matching.

[FrancesHinden]

Car journeys to bridge matches help. You start by being given a bidding problem to do in your head. Next you get an opening lead problem, then you have a declarer play problem and finally (and hardest) you get a defensive problem. By the time you've done a few of these your visualisation skills have improved enormously.

[quiddity]

FrancesHinden, on 2011-November-08, 14:47, said:

Car journeys to bridge matches help. You start by being given a bidding problem to do in your head. Next you get an opening lead problem, then you have a declarer play problem and finally (and hardest) you get a defensive problem. By the time you've done a few of these your visualisation skills have improved enormously.

Arrive alive - don't think and drive!
a message from the acbl.

[Rossoneri]

We've done this before at university club trainings: We'll pick up our own hand as per normal, and have 30 seconds to look at it, then everyone places their cards face down. We'll then bid with the cards face down, and play by naming a card first and then turning it over. Getting the wrong card involves some sort of a penalty. It is great fun (at least to those of us who are bridge nerds) and it helps in training visualisation.

[y66]

This excerpt from Matthew Syed's Bounce expands on barmar's comment:

Quote

... let’s take a detour into the world of chess. You’ll be aware that chess grandmasters have astonishing powers of recall and are able to play a mind-boggling number of games at the same time, without even looking at the boards. Alexander Alekhine, a Russian grandmaster, once played twenty-eight games simultaneously while blindfolded in Paris in 1925, winning twenty-two, drawing three, and losing three.

Surely these feats speak of psychological powers that extend beyond the wit of “ordinary” people like you and me. Or do they?

In 1973, William Chase and Herbert Simon, two American psychologists, constructed a devastatingly simple experiment to find out (Chase is the researcher who would later conduct the experiment with SF). They took two groups of people—one consisting of chess masters, the other composed of novices—and showed them chessboards with twenty to twenty-five pieces set up as they would be in normal games. The subjects were shown the boards briefly and then asked to recall the positions of the pieces.

Just as expected, the chess masters were able to recall the position of every piece on the board, while the nonplayers were able to place only four or five pieces. But the genius of the experiment was about to be revealed.

In the next set of tests, the procedure was repeated, except this time the pieces were set up not as in real games, but randomly. The novices, once again, were unable to recall more than five or so pieces. But the astonishing thing is that the experts, who had spent years playing chess, were no better: they were also stumped when trying to place more than five or six pieces. Once again, what looked like special powers of memory were in fact nothing of the kind.

What was going on? In a nutshell, when chess masters look at the positions of the pieces on a board, they see the equivalent of a word. Their long experience of playing chess enables them to chunk the pattern with a limited number of visual fixations in the same way that our familiarity with language enables us to chunk the letters constituting a familiar word. It is a skill derived from years of familiarity with the relevant “language,” not from talent. As soon as the language of chess is disrupted by the random positioning of pieces, chess masters find themselves looking at a jumble of letters, just like the rest of us.

The same findings extend to other games like bridge, and much else besides. Time and again, the amazing abilities of experts turn out to be not innate gifts but skills drawn from years of dedication that disappear as soon as they are transported beyond their specific realm of expertise. Take SF. Even after he had built up the capacity to remember an astonishing eighty-two numbers, he was unable to recall more than six or seven random consonants.

Source: Syed, Matthew (2010-04-02). Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success (p. 26). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

My favorite local bridge pro, Jeff Roman, who was also a decent chess player as a kid, once reported that he acquired a knack for solving bridge problems in his head at the dinner table where his father would throw out tough problems for the family to solve.

[xcurt]

y66, on 2011-November-08, 18:54, said:

This excerpt from Matthew Syed's Bounce expands on barmar's comment:


Source: Syed, Matthew (2010-04-02). Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success (p. 26). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

My favorite local bridge pro, Jeff Roman, who was also a decent chess player as a kid, once reported that he acquired a knack for solving bridge problems in his head at the dinner table where his father would throw out tough problems for the family to solve.

Unfortunately the cited authors didn't originate this idea. It goes back to de Groot, the Dutch international player from the 30s.

[y66]

xcurt, on 2011-November-08, 20:40, said:

Unfortunately the cited authors didn't originate this idea. It goes back to de Groot, the Dutch international player from the 30s.

The author gives credit to de Groot in a footnote which I missed:

Quote

Chase and Simon were building on the pioneering work of A. D. de Groot.

[EricK]

Quote

What was going on? In a nutshell, when chess masters look at the positions of the pieces on a board, they see the equivalent of a word. Their long experience of playing chess enables them to chunk the pattern with a limited number of visual fixations in the same way that our familiarity with language enables us to chunk the letters constituting a familiar word. It is a skill derived from years of familiarity with the relevant “language,” not from talent. As soon as the language of chess is disrupted by the random positioning of pieces, chess masters find themselves looking at a jumble of letters, just like the rest of us.

The same findings extend to other games like bridge, and much else besides. Time and again, the amazing abilities of experts turn out to be not innate gifts but skills drawn from years of dedication that disappear as soon as they are transported beyond their specific realm of expertise. Take SF. Even after he had built up the capacity to remember an astonishing eighty-two numbers, he was unable to recall more than six or seven random consonants.

This conclusion seems somewhat overstated based on the evidence.

Consider 3 potential types of people (using the chess example):
1. People with the natural ability to memorise a boardful of pieces, however randomly those are arranged
2. People with the ability to remember particular types of patterns given years of training in those patterns, but with no particular ability to memorise random arrangements
3. People without much ability to memorise particular patterns of chess pieces even if they played chess for many years.

People in group 1 are probably very rare.
All chessmasters will appear in group 2 (or rarely in group 1) because this is a necessary skill in order to play chess well.
Chess novices might appear in any group (again rarely in group 1) - however their would be no immediate way of telling if they were group 2 or group 3.

Assuming no participants were in group 1, we would see the results as in the experiment, even if the ability to memorise particular patterns after much practice was a quite rare innate talent - because chessmasters would be a self-selected group of people with that talent.

So the years of experience would be necessary but not sufficient to hone that skill - because the potential ability might not be there.

[barmar]

Perhaps you should read the report of the actual study, I'll bet they found ways to control for that bias. For example, rather than just two groups, novices and masters, you examine players along a spectrum of experience. What you'd expect if the hypothesis is true is that the ability improves as they've had more practice.

[Hanoi5]

That book 'Bounce' is really great. Especially if you need a boost to your self-esteem after playing/watching/knowing about a feat in your sport/hobby. But really, it is a good read (I got the audio-book and haven't finished though, I'm listening about the superstitions part)

What the book says is that anyone can get to the level of expert in any given area by spending 10 thousand hours of purposeful practice.

If you play a tourney where they allow you to play in hearts at the two-level with 18 HCP's and only five cards in spades between you and your partner, I wouldn't consider that purposeful practice. If, on the other hand, you discuss with your partner this situation and imagine what you would do with the opponents' cards, how you could have gotten to a spade contract with their cards, whether there would have been more competition and how the defense and play would go better in each case, then that might just be purposeful practice.

[Zelandakh]

Modern brain scans have revealed that chess GMs use the face-recognition part of the brain to recognise chess positions. This "re-wiring" of the brain is sometimes cited as one reason why it is very rare for chess players to reach the highest of standards unless they have hit certain benchmark levels during their school years.

Edit: @Hanoi, I am reasonably confident that I have spent my 10000 hours of purposeful practise in bridge and am nowhere close to expert standard. Perhaps one reason for that is that my 10000 hours have been spent with over 90% on bidding and less than 10% on card play. Perhaps in bridge you need to spend 10000 hours in each of the 3 disciplines?

[Flameous]

10000 hours is huge amount of time. Even spending 5 hours a day on average, it still takes about 6 years. And I think only pros average anywhere near 5 hours a day. (guess that's why they are pros)

Btw, I liked Frances' tip. I always have to focus extremely hard to visualize and do bridge problems in my head. Maybe my game would get better by practicing on that. Gonna spend my next 10000 hours on that. (so lucky to be a junior, still got many 10000 hours to spend )

[Fluffy]

I'm trying to encourage my students to visualice a hand by making them play double dummy some hands from time to time, not sure if this really works, haven't tried hard enough to tell yet.

What it sure does is change a bit their way of thinking, they can easilly foresee a couple of extra tricks ahead than they usually do when they can see all hand, and it makes them stop and think on positions about next plays, not current trick.

[EricK]

barmar, on 2011-November-09, 04:09, said:

Perhaps you should read the report of the actual study, I'll bet they found ways to control for that bias. For example, rather than just two groups, novices and masters, you examine players along a spectrum of experience. What you'd expect if the hypothesis is true is that the ability improves as they've had more practice.

But even that doesn't eliminate the problem as the people who are better at it would also be the people who tend to practice more. If you found you were "good at chess" (which is not too far from saying you are good at this sort of pattern recognition) you would likely practice it more and get even better. If you found that despite playing a lot you never quite "got it", you are more likely to get bored and give it up.

Could those of you who can visualise a bridge position, and analyze it mentally, answer this:
After you started trying to do this, how long did it take you to be able to do it quite well? After that, how long did it take you to get really good at it?

[billw55]

I think blindfold skills in either game develop naturally in dedicated players, who practice it frequently if not deliberately. What poster on this forum has not spent many hours thinking about bridge hands at times that a deck or display is not in front of them? Perhaps while eating lunch, at your desk, or laying in bed at night. Not to mention postmortems conducted almost anywhere. The same certainly goes for chess players. All that is blindfold practice, even though it isn't intended that way.

[Flameous]

One thing that I just realized, don't know if others feel the same.

After I have finished the hand and seen all the cards, I can think of the deal afterwards and think of the ending, especially figure how I should have played for this or that squeeze.
However it seems to be much more demanding in advance to try to think of all the possible layouts of cards and even then I should think of the best line.
It's actually quite obvious now that I wrote it, but I just hadn't thought of it like that before. Workload you have to do thinking of all possible layouts compared to knowing the layout and thinking of all the possible lines.