We all know you can play against cosumi in blindfold mode. But you can see the board there and the last move is shown on it.
It doesn’t resemble real blindfold experience. If you ever saw people play blindfold, moves are called out by voice and often the players do have a real blindfold on. So they don’t have an empty board in front of them with the moves shown on it.
Voice call-out over the internet is a bit difficult with pronunciation difficulties etc. But we can come close to it by pming each other our moves.
So that’s what we with @Satomi did. We also flooded the chat with garbage so only the last move is visible and we aren’t allowed to scroll back. And no board use allowed. Only your head.
This is much tougher than cosumi. I’m not sure if I recommend trying it. It borders that line where it’s not fun anymore but torturous. I guess you could try it one time to see if you like it.
You can look over the game record with my commentary:
It sure is fun from the beginning to middle game but before entering yose its totally different matter its a torture. I need to rearrange my stones again in my imagination board before i can proceed. And you know how that happened when i got lost track of stones . And @S_Alexander its true i want to drag the game up to the end . First time taking this blindfold go to the end. Although i had a headache after a game, i don’t think i can play another of this straining game for awhile. Thanks for that wonderful, torturous and worth it game.
In this video two pros play blindfold go on 9x9. But the goal is not really win but to reach jigo. I guess the idea is to force the players to estimate territory too.
It’s interesting how they’re using の, the possessive particle, instead of a dash or no separator at all. A dash would probably look too much like 一 (one).
Also how they use the 3三 rather than A3 or 3-3 syntax. 5の三 literally means “three of five” and 5の五 means “five of five”.
On their board, 1–13 is rightwards X and 一 to 十三 is downwards Y.
I suppose that the Arabic and Japanese numerals are both pronounced the same in Japanese, but that’s only a guess. Perhaps they use different readings to disambiguate them.
From posts made on L19 in 2016, by Uberdude and Fairbairn:
Bao Yun is a Chinese amateur 6d who is famous for being good at playing blindfold Go (…) He’s unknownplr on KGS
The top blindfold player in the world is a Chinese amateur, Bao Yun. He has got as far as 345 against a fellow amateur (lost by a few points). He also apparently got to 313 moves taking 2 stones against a top pro, Zhou Ruiyang, and scoring a jigo, but I haven’t seen that game.
In contrast, pros have managed only up to about 120 moves, and even then usually play simplistic games. GoGoD has several pro-pro blindfold games but they haven’t really tried it all that often.
In March 2013 Bao issued a worldwide challenge for one million RMB (US$160,000) for anyone who can beat him with both players blindfolded. At that point, Bao had not lost a single such game even though his opponents have included several professionals. He has played as many as four boards simultaneously.
Not sure if it’s still running, but a Korean baduk station also broadcast a program called Dark Room Game, in which two professionals play blindfolded up to 100 moves. If either side makes an illegal move, they lose a point; after 100 moves, they take off the blindfold and continue as normal.
There are also permanently blind players, although they use special feely boards. The best is probably still the Korean Song Chung-t’aek, who is 5-dan amateur.
Also in that thread is the record of Bao’s blindfold exhibition game against Eric Lui, played on KGS.
I recently posted a photo of a haptic board in use.
I just stumbled on this photo of a British (?) board from 1975, which – whilst probably not made with that intention in mind – would have served well to provide tactile support to blind players.
Produced by House of Marbles and dated July 1975. The board is 440mm x 407mm, 23mm thick and is made of two bonded (edge to edge) pieces of what appears to be pine. The dimples are 20mm apart. Included are 189 black and 191 white 13mm marbles and the JAL/BGA rules leaflet. (Photos and info from Alex Carey)
I just came across this L19 thread started by Fairbairn (who, by the way, recently claimed to have quit with the typically bitter exclamation “I’m sick of the self-flagellation that is required to try and keep some life in this dying forum”).
12-year-old Iwasaki Haruto has just (April 2021) joined the insei league in the Nihon Ki-in’s Tokyo branch. (…) He is almost totally blind. (…)
The board young Iwasaki Haruto plays on is basically the same type that debuted in Prague [European Congress 2005] - plastic stones grooved underneath so that they can clamp onto raised board lines. The black and white stones are differentiated by colour, of course, but also by one colour having a little knob on top. The blind players analyse the position by feeling the board with their fingers. (…) The latest design enhancement has been to make boards that come apart into four separate pieces. (…)
[Haruto] had to go to a special blind school and that is where he started playing go, attracted to it because of the connection with his grandfather’s [Go club] rent-out. He was about six. (…)
Three years later, as nominally amateur 1-dan, he joined a local club run by a strong amateur 6-dan Sogabe Toshiyuki. Sogabe gave him special attention, and arranged games with a pro, Mizuma Toshifumi 8-dan. At first Mizuma was able to beat the youngster down from five to seven stones. But Haruto zoomed up to 6-dan in about seven months. This led to an introduction to pro 6-dan Nobuta Shigehito (around 70 now, but he was once a pupil in the Kitani school). (…) Nobuta noted the combination of talent and intense concentration in Haruto, and that led him to suggest trying out as an insei.
The teachers (in Beijing) ranged from 5 dan to Bao Yun. Bao Yun is a former 2 dan professional player … [he] played two games of blind Go, simultaneously!
Bao Yun gave two of the strongest western players three and four stones handicap – as if a blindfold wasn’t enough handicap! … [He] won the first game by resignation, and lost the second by 4.5 points. Amazingly, he plays all the dame points … and could count the score accurately.
