1st Kyū

If you have made it this far, you have every basic skill blindfold chess asks for. You can maneuver pieces on a mental board without a physical one in front of you, and you understand what pattern recognition means.

Pattern recognition is what the middlegame runs on. That is the hardest phase, and the one that loads you up cognitively. Pattern recognition is hard to acquire, but the more blindfold games you actually play, the more patterns you will start to see.

Openings and endgames, though — are those not easier to play than the middlegame?

For openings, settling on a fixed set and memorising the lines you meet most often works for blindfold chess too. Once a line is memorised you answer with book moves without thinking, so it costs you nothing cognitively. It is not unusual to end up coasting almost automatically until you reach the Tabia.

There are arguments against memorising openings, of course. Ones like these:

• Chess is about ideas, not memory
• The moment your opponent plays something odd you are out of your memorised lines and it is worthless
• You will have forgotten it all in six months anyway

Each of those is fair, so nothing here is going to force you to memorise openings. But for anyone who wants to try, there is a feature for it:

Register the openings you play up there, and you can check at which point one of your blindfold games in this app left the line. Give it a go if you feel like it.

This app's version is a beta and still rough, so pairing it with something like Chessable is a good idea.