drag out as much debris as you can with a leaf rake....
I had a pool swamp for many years before purchasing a cover, and opened each year to an insane amount of giant leaves. The one product that was a life saver was the Big Sucker Leaf Pool Vacuum (Amazon sells it along with nearly identical ones which I assume are all similar). You attach a garden hose along with a pole and lower it into the pool. The water flow naturally creates a suction and the leaves rise up into a mesh bag on top. After a little trial and error, it is IMHO the best way to blindly get leaves out of a pool. Just a word of caution: a full mesh bag of leaves gets heavy and bringing it above surface is like a trophy fish tugging at your fishing pole, so you want to bring it before the bag fills up (you get a feel for how long that is after a few times). You also need to keep in mind that when you bring it out of the water, the water sprays out from the top, so this is how we mastered it:
1) Keep a wheelbarrow at your side
2) Lower the contraption into the pool, bring it back up, and when it is near pool surface, bend and squeeze the the hose to stop the flow.
3) Place the base (wheels down) into the wheelbarrow and invert the mesh bag down through the base to empty it (yes, it is disgusting, so wear gloves). Don't bother removing the bag each time by loosening the drawstring as the instructions recommend, it is unnecessary and time consuming.
4) Repeat and when the wheelbarrow is full, dump it somewhere.
One other note: You don't need to and shouldn't wait until you completely blind scoop to get your water clear. We year after year (pre-bbb and while using bbb) turned the darkest green pool crystal clear while having leaves and dirt on the bottom. It may take a little more chlorine, but the benefits of seeing what you are doing is a worthy trade-off. So we keep at slam level and the pool always cleared within a 2-5 few days. We would then see what we were doing and instead of rolling the big sucker along the pool floor, we would lower directly over patches leaves, lift, and lower over the remaining leaves. The downside to clearing leaves when the water is clear is that after a while, it kicks up dirt and makes the water cloudy. At that point, since the pool was already cloudy, we blind brush the walls and surface to kick up all the dirt, and let the filter run until it clears. Repeat that 2-4 times and you will have the most sparkling water. (If you have a DE filter like we do, keep a close eye at the stage after kicking up the dirt. The filter will need backwashing pretty often.)
Big Sucker Leaf Pool Vacuum:
