and tell me their ideas about Chess 960.FISCHER RANDOM CHESS (CHESS 960)
I have been interested in chess since I was a child and my father taught me this fantastic game that requires visual and spatial intelligence, memory, calculation, but also intuition, creativity and even aesthetic sense.
Recently I started getting more and more interested in the chess variant proposed by Robert (Bobby) Fischer in 1996 and that is known as Fischer Random Chess or Chess 960.
The rules to be followed in this variant are exactly the same as in classic chess; the difference is that the initial setup (that is the starting position of pieces) may be one out of the 960 possible positions that meet the following criteria:
Such being the rules, the possible starting positions are 960 and the "classic" starting position can simply be viewed as one of these positions.
The aim of this chess variant is to favour the "natural" ability of intelligent and talented players instead of favouring who plays home-prepared, overanalyzed and memorized opening lines of 10, 15 or 20 moves. I have nothing against players who are eager to study databases but the fact is that the deja vu is very tiring, boring and even able to negatively affect tournament results if you consider the high number of draws on agreement commonly occurring after few moves.
In another page I show some examples of chess positions, having tactical or strategical implications, taken from some of the Chess 960 games that I normally play on the Internet Chess Server www.instantchess.com.
So, how can you start a new Chess 960 game? How can you organize an entire Tournament without wasting time in deciding what the starting position should be in each game?
Various methods of forming the initial setup have been proposed.
PLAY&START
I recommend, even for tournament events, a method of forming the starting position that I call PLAY&START because the starting position is decided not by chance but directly by the two players playing alternately, with active clocks. Thus the formation of the starting position becomes actual part of the game, by considering the placement of each piece as if it were a game move.
The fact that Tournament Directors prefer that all boards in a single round should play the same random position, as to maintain order and abbreviate the setup time for each round, reveals a spurious problem in the light of this method of mine, because the starting position is reached during normal play, also being the chess clock active.
In order to avoid reaching impasse positions, where a piece could not be
legally placed (e.g. a bishop could not be placed because of no vacant squares
of a certain colour), I advise to fix a standard order for piece placement,
starting with the king and proceeding with the rooks, the bishops, then the
queen and the knights.
At the beginning of the game, White places his/her king (of course on a square from b1 to g1, because, as the King must always be placed between the two rooks, it may never be placed in a corner square!) and then presses the clock button. It is now Black’s turn to place his/her king mirroring the white King and to place the first rook on the board. Then Black presses the clock button and it is White’s turn to place a rook in front of the Black’s one and to choose the position of the second rook…and so on until the board is complete and White makes the first move.
I support the immediate enforcement of the Play&Start mode to every chess event
(without the need to create a
separate chess circuit!), because such “960 Tournaments” would after all
allow every game to be also played starting from the classic position, if the players
please to place their pieces in that way, instead of forming a random position.
So I think that nobody could have anything to complain about, could they?
Players would have the freedom to choose either a widely analyzed path or a
random position that could unleash their "natural" chess intelligence
and ability.
OTHER PROCEDURES
On the other hand there are other procedures for starting a Chess 960 game, that intend to guarantee a total unpredictability of the starting position. Among such "random" procedures, the most simple, practical and economical would be a method using a common six-sided die (with pips/numbers from 1 to 6).
In 2002 Hans L. Bodlaender proposed a way of using a common six-sided die, that he describes on his web site. Bodlaender's procedure was also quoted and described by David A. Wheeler who published an essay on Fischer Random Chess both on his web site and on the English version of the Wikipedia in 2003.
The inconvenience of Bodlaender's method is that the
placement of some pieces requires to roll the die twice or more because some die
results (5 and/or 6) are not acceptable.
At the end of 2005 I proposed the method described below, that is faster and more elegant than Bodlaender's method. My method still uses a common six-sided die but it never requires to roll the die twice or more in order to place a piece: the great elegance of this faster method is that every side of the die is useful, i.e. every result of the die roll is valid in order to place pieces.The drawback is that it doesn't give each initial position the same probability to appear.
You can also find it described in the Wikipedia at the same link above, in the section "Another method with six-sided dice". Here is the description of what I have called Die6tart (the number 6 indicates the sides of the die and also wants to represent the S of "Start": you can read it either ,daIsik'sta:rt or daI'sta:rt):
In this method, every time a piece is placed, there will be one, two, three, or six possible spaces for it. If one, there is no need to roll a die; if two, assign them the die-result-ranges 1-3 and 4-6; if three, assign them the ranges 1-2, 3-4, and 5-6.
The Die6tart method requires a minimum of 4 die rolls and a maximum of 6 rolls (at least one roll less than Bodlaender’s method on average). As far as the probability of forming the starting position, let's consider for example that the King is in b1 in 108 out of 960 positions, which is a probability of 108/960, or 9/80 (almost 1/9); my method gives it the probability of a die roll, that is 1/6.
Anyone
is invited to send me a message to and tell me their ideas about Chess 960.
The basic questions could be: why rejecting the more general concept that the starting position in chess should be simply considered as one out of 960 possible positions? After all, you can play following the same rules and strategies when you start a game from any position of those, don't you agree?
But please be intellectually honest and fair when explaining your point of view.
If you want to play some Chess 960 games, I think that a good site to do so is www.instantchess.com. In my opinion this site offers one of the best playing interface, including the option of playing Chess 960 games, the identification of players by the flag of their country (how romantic, isn't it?) and even a random way of searching for opponents that prevents snooty and snobby players from forming closed and exclusive groups.
My ID on this chess server is Gynus Keen (do you know what it means? The solution is at the bottom of the next page, a page that deals with positions to be solved, taken from my own Fischer Random Chess games).
