25 August 2018

10th Anniversary!

This week I passed the tenth year blogging about chess960. The first post was on my main blog: Shall We Play Fischerandom Chess? (19 August 2008). Almost as if on cue, I received an unexpected anniversary present in the announcement that Kasparov To Make Chess960 Debut (chess.com; Peter Doggers):-
This year, we'll again see Garry Kasparov at the chessboard. The 13th world champion is among the players in the Champions Showdown in St. Louis next month, where the format will be matches of Chess960 -- which Kasparov never tried before.

The announcement went on to give details, which I'll present as an image, because of the list of match opponents.

Peter Doggers might not be aware, but Kasparov is reported to have played chess960 before. I posted about the occasion in Kasparov *Did* Play Chess960 (September 2012), where I quoted GM Sergey Shipov saying,

In 1998 [...] we played six games of Fischerandom chess, and there was no battle there at all! In completely unfamiliar positions, Kasparov's advantage over me was far greater than in normal chess. In the absence of the usual pathfinders his flights of fancy, his sense of dynamics, and his ability to instantly separate the important from the secondary became particularly salient.
For more posts about GM Kasparov on this blog, see It's Not About Short Draws, Garry (February 2014):-
When the 13th World Champion talks, people listen. When he talks about chess960, I listen very carefully. Here are some of the things he's said, or that have been said about him, that I've noted in past posts on this blog.

Twenty games times five matches means 100 games of chess960 played by some of the best chess players in the world, including a few veterans of the Mainz chess960 tournaments. What will we learn from those games?

1 comment:

HarryO said...

Congrats for ten years Mark! Great news about another Chess960 event. I hope that the elite players realise that 960 opening theory can be deeply studied, it is just that it takes many thousands of games of synthesis before the player starts to see patterns. I am still learning these patterns after 7500 or so games and am definitely noticing theories evolving in my mind that a top player could turn into a book.