Solving a blindfold puzzle

I listen to chess-related podcasts on my phone when I walk my dog. One of the oldest and best is The Perpetual Chess Podcast hosted by Ben Johnson. Sometimes at the end of the episodes Ben gives a blindfold puzzle. I almost never try them, because on the few occasions I have I got confused as to where the pieces were after about the first four moves. On a recent episode Ben had one that was taken from his guest Martin Justesen's book that was relatively easy so I gave it a go, and actually got it right--sort of. I'll explain the "sort of" below.

For those who don't know what I mean by "blindfold puzzle," it's a puzzle where you aren't shown a diagram of a position. You're simply told where the pieces are, or the moves of the game are called out from the initial starting position. This particular puzzle is an example of the latter. Stronger players will undoubtedly find it laughably easy; beginners will probably find it impossible. For the rest of you, hopefully it will be a reasonable challenge.

I'll give a list of the initial moves. Below that I'll have a diagram playing the moves out, but obviously don't look at that until after you've tried to solve it. The Lichess study I'm linking to was actually put up by Ben to go along with his podcast. We're dealing here with Puzzle #1. Unfortunately the solution is in the move list to the right of the diagram, so I'm going to leave some space above the diagram so you don't see it by accident. After you try to solve it, then scroll down.

White Black
1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 d6
4. Nc3 Ne7
5. Nd5 g6??
White to play.

Don't scroll down until you're ready for the answer.

I'm serious.

I tried to just have some blank space here but the software just takes out the empty space.

Then I tried to insert a photograph of a girl on a bicycle so that would take up the space, but I haven't been able to insert photographs into my blogs for months for some reason, so that didn't work either. You know what, though, that's a good photo anyway. I'll use it as the intro photo to this edition of the blog.

So I'm just taking up space by making jibber-jabber.

There, that ought to be enough now.

https://adjva4.dpdns.org/study/ZYkBctm8/gXF6JORT

I got the correct answer, but I can't be too excited about it because even though I chose the correct sixth move for White I didn't realize it was checkmate. In my mind the f8 square was empty, so after 6. Nf6+ I thought Black had an escape square with 6. ... Kf8 and then White had to administer checkmate on the next move with 7. Bh6 mate. This is of course wrong, not only because Black doesn't have f8 as an escape square but because even if he did, 7. Bh6 is illegal. The White d-pawn never moved so White can't get his bishop to h6.

Visualization is something I've never been very good at, in chess or anything else. Whenever I've tried to decorate or design anything I've never made much progress because I never know what I want the end product to look like. Whenever I try to draw or paint something it usually ends up looking like a stick figure because I can't see in my mind what I'm trying to get down on the paper. I often forget the details of what acquaintances look like. This is just a minor inconvenience for the most part, but I imagine that being good at visualization is a big advantage in chess.

In his book All the Wrong Moves Sasha Chapin claimed that he had a complete inability to see a mental picture in his mind at all when he played chess, which made it difficult for him. He appears to be at about the same rating level as me so this interested me. I don't see how you can play chess if you can't visualize at all, but it could be that you can calculate simple combinations and things by making mental notes of which pieces are captured by both sides without actually having a mental picture. When I calculate I'm probably doing a combination of both, but the mental notes aspect of it is probably stronger for me than the visualization.

There are exercises and puzzles that supposedly help you improve your ability to visualize, and maybe something like that would help me. The problem is, there are only so many hours in the day and between playing games, analyzing them and doing regular tactics puzzles (and writing this blog) my chess time is already taken up. I'd have to give up something in order to get visualization training in there also and I'm hesitant to stop doing the things that I think are helping me now.