Dvoretsky on Chess960

I'm getting a lot of mileage out of Dvoretsky this week. First I referenced an interview with the world renowned trainer by Chessvibes.com in a post on my main blog: Recently Spotted - Blog Carnival & Soviet School. Then I used excerpts from the interview on my World Championship blog: Dvoretsky on the World Championship. Now I am going to tackle a reference to chess960.

At the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008 on the ChessCafe site my big articles about the chess problems was published. It’s mainly about the very harmful influence of opening theory and some other aspects. Maybe somebody who wants to know my opinion about some important chess problems can read this article. I analyze the influence of opening theory, I analyze Fischerrandom/Chess960 and make another suggestion for how it’s possible to change the chess rules and so on. (From The big Dvoretsky interview, part 3).

Chessvibes also provided links to the ChessCafe articles, which were titled 'Polemic Thinking' -- Part 1 & Part 2 -- both PDFs. Here are the section headings from both parts.

1. The Components of Success; (à la Botvinnik) where the fourth component, 'Specialized chess preparation' is the springboard for the rest of the essay.

2. The Role of Opening Theory

3. The Principles of Working Effectively

4. Problems In Contemporary Chess; 'I could go on for a long time, making a list of the existing problems, but for now I would like to dwell on just one of them: the negative influence of opening theory on contemporary chess.'

5. Chess960

6. An Alternative Suggestion; (to chess960)

The flow of Dvoretsky's essay is evident from the headings. I'll look at the fifth section, on chess960, in another post. The sixth section, 'An Alternative Suggestion' is an attempt to decouple chess from the burden of opening preparation while keeping the familiar RNBQKBNR setup. I don't know if anyone has tried the idea in competition, but I'll leave the investigation to others who are more interested than I am.