04 April 2015

CHESSIS2C960 Chess.com

In the previous post I tried to present Chess is to chess960 [CHESSIS2C960] Visually. At the same time I asked the collective brainpower at Chess.com,
I'm looking for chess analogies to explain chess960: 'Chess is to chess960 as ... is to ...' Any suggestions? • Chess960 Analogies

It was the right forum to ask. Eliminating a handful of examples that I threw in myself, some worthy suggestions were:-

  • as black & white TV is to color TV
  • as V2 is to V3
  • as raw spaghetti is to cooked spaghetti
  • as blind obedience is to self reliance
  • as Nascar racing is to F1
  • as F1 is to Nascar racing

Midway through the discussion, I realized that a better formulation might have been 'Chess openings are to chess960 openings as ... is to ...'. Thanks to the racing analogies another angle occurred to me while I was preparing this post.

Chess *castling* is to chess960 castling as an automatic transmission is to a stick shift.

Why? Because in traditional chess the choice of 'where' to castle is usually obvious (and often conventional) although 'when' is sometimes tricky. In many chess960 openings one of the hardest early decisions is where and when to castle.

Which of the analogies do I like best? I'm not sure, but the one I understand the least is about spaghetti.

4 comments:

HarryO said...

The spaghetti analogy is the trickiest I agree. Cooking spaghetti is to process spaghetti from raw resource into a product. But Chess960 is not really a processed version of Chess. I think that is the difficulty....

Here is another analogy.

Chess is to Chess960 as....

Brittanica is to Internet.

This post put a smile on my face thanks Mark. I liked your visual version of this post as well.

Mark Weeks said...

Got it! The one I like best is 'as V2 is to V3'. It is mysterious (what is V1?) and anticipatory (what will be V4?). It was also proposed by one of the two trolls on the Chess.com thread, making it unexpected. - Mark

GeneM said...

Chess is to chess960
as
World championship checkers-1847 is to world championship checkers-1934.
.
This checkers analogy hits the mark. The mainstream checkers community dealt with its opening repetition problem, but mainstream chess has yet to.
.
Thanks, GeneM

Higgiez960 LTD said...

Is "CastlinG" meant 2b that easy in all initial 960 randomized starting positions when nothing changes....ChessA-H 960 thats LTD♡