The [Chessbase] article also attracted more than 200 comments, many of them with ideas worth further exploration. Perhaps I'll tackle these in a future post.
Here are the first 20 or so comments that, in my opinion, made a particularly good point worth exploring.
Ken Neat 2/28/2018 09:35 • I am surprised that David Bronstein's version of random chess is never mentioned. Here the back rank is empty at the start, and the first eight moves for each player are to place their eight pieces on the board, with certain restrictions (e.g.the bishops). To me this seems far more interesting than the Fischer version.
John Upper 2/28/2018 10:00 • Rather than say FRC does away with "preparation" you should say it does away with "opening preparation". Preparing by working on tactics and learning endgames is still very beneficial to playing FRC.
Petrarlsen 3/1/2018 04:24 • I find the idea of games entirely decided over the board interesting, but I find also extremely interesting the "fight of opening ideas" that can be seen in top-GMs games.
peterfrost 3/1/2018 06:46 • An obvious attempt to address this which is rarely tried is to randomise the pairings (rather than the pieces!) so that players don't know who they will be playing on a given day. This will at least make preparation considerably harder, as I think a big part of the problem is "cramming" the night before a game to get ready for a known opponent.
BeFreeBusy 3/1/2018 07:59 • Why abandon the game of chess and, for too large part, the beauty and history of it?
celeje 3/1/2018 08:14 • One of the main points of chess960 is that it can exist alongside the game with the traditional starting position, played by the same people, with the same skills rewarded. There's no replacement going on.
lajosarpad 3/1/2018 09:16 • A year playing a single position seems to be quite long. An improvement on that might be to randomize a single position for each tournament of FRC and let the players and commentators know the randomized position in advance. This way the random variant will stay random, but we will see some basic openings and the commentators will have ample time to prepare for their job.
fons3 3/1/2018 12:46 • [Bronstein's version] Not mentioned in this article but I think that putting a piece on the board should count as a move so the clock would be running.
Petrarlsen 3/1/2018 02:19 • In chess960 (obviously, in my opinion, it can be mastered in less than 5 minutes. by any experienced chess player, even a complete amateur), only that, in several chess960 starting positions, castling is very weird and quite inharmonious.
svr 3/1/2018 03:33 • Before the start of the game, both players will look at the starting position for a few minutes. Then one of them will set the clocks (with their total adding to 30 minutes, if it is a rapid game, for example). Then the other player will choose on which side to play.
boorchess 3/1/2018 06:11 •
http://www.quantumgambitz.com/blog/chess/cga/bronstein-chess-pre-chess-shuffle-chess
KWRegan 3/1/2018 09:15 • Link to what is really just combining Bronstein's and Fischer's ideas:
http://www.chessvariants.com/diffsetup.dir/baselinef.html
Mawin 3/2/2018 06:55 • I have suggested that players randomize the pieces themselves. The players may, before play begins, swap places of the king + queen and another piece except the rooks. The castling rules are the same as in chess960. [...] "Relocation variants - rearranging the initial array"
http://mlwi.magix.net/bg/relocationvariants.htm
elmerdssngalang 3/2/2018 09:04 • Place the big money on chess960 and soon it will gain popularity among the best traditional chess players. One great advantage to be gained is that more players from lower ranks can be allowed to compete with the best ones on a more level playing field.
geraldsky 3/2/2018 02:08 • If Paul Morphy and Harry Philsbury [were] still alive they would play equally against modern players in chess960
koko48 3/2/2018 03:15 • In traditional chess, no matter how many theoretical or previously analyzed moves you play, you (almost always) eventually reach a unique position. The only difference is that with chess960, you get the 'unique' position earlier. But as the game progresses well into the middlegame, the chess960 positions start to look like positions from a traditional game. [...] So in essence chess theory will go back to the way it was in the late 1800s or early 1900s in traditional chess, when modern opening theory was in its infancy, and there as much more creativity in the early stages of the game
Petrarlsen 3/2/2018 03:31 • In one of the Carlsen - Nakamura game, the two players castled on move one, and I rather think that every game played with this position between top GMs would follow the same course; this feels more like a farce than like the beginning of a serious game.
Jacob woge 3/4/2018 02:27 • As for the Carlsen - Nakamura match, the main interest lies in the result. The sporting element is emphasized. The games are, with the exception of a few endings, to forget.
Petrarlsen 3/4/2018 03:50 • In traditional chess, in a very large majority of positions, it is possible to explain castling by the two ideas of the safety of the King and the development of one of the Rooks. I don't think that in chess960 it is possible to find such clear and general ideas who could be applied more or less everywhere, for castling.
That last comment -- 'clear and general ideas for castling' -- is worthy of a separate post, perhaps an article, perhaps even a book. The discussion circled around the topic for a long time. The remark by the same commenter (see above at 3/2/2018 03:31) on first move castling belongs to the same discussion.
Also worth a separate investigation is the thread on Bronstein's version of shuffle chess. I've never played it, so I can't comment directly. A big advantage of Fischer's version is that the castling rules ensure that a game eventually looks and feels like a traditional chess game. Is the same true of Bronstein's version?
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