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Blindfold chess/backgammon

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Saturday, 18 May 2013, at 3:06 a.m.

In Response To: The Chaos of the Dice -- A Backgammon Hustler's Quest to Gain an Edge (Henrik Bukkjaer)

Henrik wrote:

I found it easier to play chess blind, than I do backgammon.

Your explanation makes sense.

I think there's another contributing factor. In general, the more "meaning" we can assign to a position, the easier it tends to be to remember, and the more "purely abstract" the position is, the harder it tends to be to remember. When I try to recall a backgammon position, what I generally have most trouble remembering are the exact locations of the spares, because it is often the case that shuffling the spares slightly does not change the "meaning" of the position much. And of course in most positions there are a number of spares to keep track of. In chess, I think it's less common for there to be "slight" alterations that don't affect the position.

I recall reading a story (I don't know if it's true or not) where a grandmaster arranged for a simultaneous blindfold exhibition. His opponents colluded, by playing extremely similar games but with slight variations. For example, perhaps they all started with 1...g6 2...b6 and then shuffled their bishops between a6-b7-c8 and f8-g7-h6 but in slightly different ways. In this way they stripped away all meaning from their positions and turned the exhibition into a purely mathematical test of memory. The grandmaster was flummoxed and had to capitulate.

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