Role Model

I, the developer of this service, am also a chess player.

I believe I'm rather unusual as a chess player because I'm Japanese. In Japan, board games (mind sports) other than chess, such as Shogi and Go, are very popular. Shogi in particular is popular as something uniquely Japanese, and strong Japanese chess players very often have a Shogi background. In contrast, I have absolutely no experience with Shogi or Go. I'm a pure chess player.

I also started my chess career in my late 30s. This is quite a late start compared to players from countries where chess is part of everyday life. Additionally, I don't possess any special talents like exceptional information processing abilities—in fact, my IQ is below average.

I started participating in official tournaments in Japan in 2025, and after competing in several tournaments per year, my domestic rating is around 1500. This is not a particularly high rating.

I thought it would be interesting to set myself as a role model and document the process of someone like me learning to play blindfold chess.

When to Begin

That said, it's still too early to start the verification. As mentioned in About This Website, blindfold chess places a significant cognitive burden on practitioners, and one needs to gradually become accustomed to it through basic training and other steps.

This service still lacks the necessary features to put this into practice. For example, while the training lineup has become fairly comprehensive, features for measuring effectiveness are lacking.

Even in the implementation at the time of writing this article, there is feedback such as scoring, but it's not possible to accumulate records to confirm growth or analyze weak areas. This is partly intentional to keep the web app simple, but I believe it should be provided as a feature.

Whether to implement this approach in the web app is still undecided. It might be addressed through a smartphone app implementation.

Therefore, I would like to set the start time for verification as follows: "When this application has added functionality to continuously measure the effectiveness of existing practice menus, and preparations are in place to efficiently confirm progress."

I plan to decide later on what it means to have learned blindfold chess, and what timeframe to aim for in achieving this goal.