I heard that there exist players who can play a game of Go without looking at the board! Wow!

So exactly how common is it among professionals to possess this skill? Are there any amateurs capable of doing this?

Well, Bao Yun is a Chinese amateur 6d who is famous for being good at playing blindfold Go (and can even do simultaneous), so he's probably better than most (if not all) professionals. He's unknownplr on KGS and will be at the US Go Congress this year. I played a game of blindfold Go at an EGC a few years back, but that was using one of the special boards for blind people where one set of stones has a bump on them and they slot into the grid, so you can run your hands over the board to find stones and build the mental image of the board, whereas I believe Bao simply gets the coordinates called to him.

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.

If anyone wants to try this out themselves, 9x9 ought to be more possible for mortals. There is also the stepping stone of one-color go.

Pretty much everyone of the equivalent of dan level in chess can play blindfold (though not me, as I can't visualize), though chess has a lot of advantages in this respect over even 9x9 go:

• Different sorts of pieces - you might think this makes things more difficult, but I think it helps for the position to have more "texture".
• The board itself has more texture as well; give me the name of one of the 64 squares and I can tell you a bunch of its properties that tend to be relevant in a game. In addition, because of diagonally-moving pieces, the colors of the squares actually are pretty semantically meaningful. In contrast, a go board has 8-fold symmetry so individual points are less distinguishable, and unless you're near a corner, there's little to distinguish, say, one third-line point from its neighbor.
• Because of the last point, coordinate names mean a lot to chess players. Say "Knight to e5" and I immediately think of all sorts of connotations and likely followups and counters. Say "Black P12" and it's just an abstract point.

I can play blindfolded 9x9 decently. The main difficulty is just messy fights - a lot of the standard shapes can just be thought of as one 'unit' of memory if you will, so even ~20 stones can easily just be thought of as one block. I haven't tried on 13x13 or higher but I expect this would make it impossible for me without a lot more practice against an opponent who wanted to fight. I can also replay the entire game from scratch in my head if I get 'lost' which definitely has saved me more than once in blindfold 9x9, but obviously in a larger game practically this would take quite a bit of time!

There are also a few blind players. I personally know Pierre Audouard, who used to be 5d a few years ago, and who suffered from progressive (now complete) sight loss. He doesn't play as much as before and I'm pretty sure he lost a few stones, but he still beat a 3d in a tournament not so long ago.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?PierreAudouard

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La victoire est un hasard, la défaite une nécessité.

My understanding is that blind players play with a special board in front of them that they can feel, as opposed to playing completely from memory. (Of course this is still much harder than playing with sight.) This is also true for blind chess players.

I don't know for all of them, but for the person I know, this is correct. It still answers the original question though.

There seems to be a common point between playing blindfolded and with a special board: according to this person, it is much more difficult to perceive space, i.e. the potential of a moyo. Any nonlocal decision, even reading out a ladder, takes more time.

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La victoire est un hasard, la défaite une nécessité.

Thanks for the info
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Today at the US Go Congress, Bao Yun played a blindfold exhibition game against Eric Lui. It appears the game went all the way to counting. http://www.usgo.org/news/2016/08/blindf ... rspective/

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Occupy Babel!

I had so much fun recording that game

I was lookng on the AGA website for result from the congress and could find nothing. Anyone have a link?

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Here is the (blindfold) game between Bao Yun and Eric Lui:

The main homepage news has various articles on the congress, and here is the top-division "crosstab"* (Bao Yun won all his games):

http://www.usgo.org/tournaments/crossta ... matrix/176

* a.k.a results table, but they don't renumber players based on result ranking as we do in Europe so looking up opponents is tedious.

Two questions, if I may:

(1) The game shown is not complete. The dame moves matter as they enhance Bo's achievement. Are the extra moves available and is the above record really correct?

(2) Why did they play even? I'd have expected an amateur to take a handicap out of respect, especially one who is giving himself a major handicap of another kind.

(1) What do you mean? The dame moves are part of the above game record.

(2) The amateur didn't "respect" the pros during the rest of the week as he won the congress with a 9-0 record. Is it really a major handicap for Bao Yun? I mean, he's done it in simultaneous games before.

Yes - as explo said - there may have been a mis-click, which causes the initial branch to end early. You can see this, and adjust accordingly.

Not in a position to comment on your second question.

Here's a different link that renumbers players (includes masters and main open section). But they must have been really busy at end because the last few rounds of the open are not there.

http://live.gocongress.org/?page_id=91

1) The transcriber made a misclick on move 212 so the main variation of the sgf is not the complete game variation: go to the variation for the continuation. (It is a rather annoying shortcoming of KGS/CGoban now that it is used extensively for broadcasts that scribes cannot delete wrong moves).
2) Bao is a strong Chinese 6d and can beat Asian pros even. He reckons playing blind is a handicap of about one stone, so even against a western pro seems sensible to me. In the main tournament he beat 2 AGA 1ps (including Eric), 2 Chinese 1ps and 1 Japanese 1p (and no loses), so the idea he is weaker than low-dan / weaker pros is obviously false. Here I am assuming "respect" means thinking they are stronger than you, perhaps you don't mean this, and the title of professional should lead to taking handicap even if you are stronger? I could see this applying with some top young amateur (e.g. Ilya Shikshin before he became pro) versus some elderly Japanese high dan pro who is a lot weaker now than he was decades ago, but not from Eric a 20-something recent AGA pro against a 30-something top Chinese 6d.

It appears that they show the opponents in the mouseover text. I suppose it's better than nothing, but that breaks all sort of accessibility rules and is an awful way to actually present information on a web site.