for a long time I have been wanting to learn to play blindfolded -- through a whole game, and not only without the utmost concentration.
I have looked at some of the software and internet applications that try to help you with that, but most are geared at learning abilities which are *not* my weak spot. Example: I know that b1 and h7 is on the same diagonal, and that it is a white diagonal. I dont really need to train that.
What my big problem is remebering where the pieces are
. So I came up with the following exercises:
I would like to start with really simple endgames (K+Q vs K, then K+R vs K, then K+R+2P vs K+R , ...) versus a command line version of crafty. Ideally it would be one of those crafty (or other engine) versions which can be dumped down to really silly personalities, to make it more fun.
The most user-friendly situation would be a directory of maybe 100 .bat files. I start 1.bat and it starts a 1100-Elo Crafty with a K+Q vs K setup. 2.bat is a 1100-Elo Crafty with a K+R vs K setup. .... 10.bat is a 1200-Elo Crafty with a K+PP vs K+PP setup ... you get the picture ?
Does anyone have anything like that already setup? Do other people also think this would be cool? Unfortunately right now I dont have the time to configure crafty for this and sort out the position, but I would enjoy to honor the effort with a number of old chess programs, like Fritz6, the task chess CD2 and some chessbase CDs, or a paypal donation, whatever.
What do you think?