Hi everyone. Has anyone pursued the idea of putting together Fischer Random tournaments over the board with standard time controls? Has a survey been conducted to see what percentage of tournament players would be receptive of the idea?
I’d think pretty low.
Much easier to play it online. FICS has that option.
Dunno if they ever run FischerRandom (Chess960) tournaments.
We tried it at our Monday night club as an unrated event once. We did like 4 rounds of game 15 or something. There was no demand to try it again.
No rated tournaments, but our non-rated ladder does one FischerRandom night per year.
We do have a State 960 Championship. I believe it is G/15. The organizer makes a pretty big deal of having some of the younger players help draw pieces out of a bag to make the opening positions. It was quite a bit of fun to play in.
.
This decade we have learned a lot about FRC, a.k.a. chess960. The major source of information have been the Rapid chess960 tournaments held each August in Mainz Germany by ChessTigers.de.
Among the many interesting things we have learned by now is that – we have already learned all we are ever going to learn about FRC, as FRC has thus far been conducted.
The best way to proceed with FRC is to de-emphasize the “Random” aspect. Better to pre-announce one of the 960 setups as the one and only setup that will be used for the next few years. Then let us watch the progression of so-called “opening theory” for that new setup.
RNBBKNQR <— is the new setup (S#549) I would recommend. It is important that we learn with a setup where White’s two knights start on different shade squares.
BTWay, after 1. e23 e76, this new setup position can be reached by legal moves in traditional chess.
Principle questions that arise in this setup include:
[1] Should players prefer to castle their kings to the c-column or the g-column? I think to the c-column.
[2] On average, will the four knights on the board advance further from their rank-1 than they do in traditional chess, given that knights of the other color do not start in as firm opposition as in traditional chess?
[3] Would 1. f24 occur more frequently than 1. c24 does in traditional chess?
[4] What is the best continuation after 1. d24 Nb8.c6; reminiscent of Alekhine’s Defense? And do perhaps 30%-50% of all traditional openings have cousins in this nontraditional setup? Cousins have the same underlying principle, but the principle gets tested with different esoteric tactics: how robust are these principles?
[5] With the home computer and chess software firmly established here in 2009, how long would it take for opening theory to develop for a second setup? Would it reach a level comparable to say traditional chess in 1950 in maybe four years? What would the graph line slope look like with the horizontal x-axis labeled “Year” (starting with 2009) and the vertical y-axis labeled “Ply Number of Novelty”?
[6] In this new setup, which is more drawish: (a) 1. d24 d75, or (b) e24 e75?
[7] Could a recent retired chess star, like Garry Kasparov, more easily return to competitive chess if a new setup were announced (for use in some tournaments), so that he would not be at any horrible opening theory deficit compared to his active up-to-date competitors?
…the list goes on…
Seeing answers emerge to questions like the above would be far more interesting that yet another year where the Chess Tigers reveal a new setup for each round minutes before the round. The random aspect suppresses opening ideas (by using unfamiliarity to overwhelm the players). But the suppression of interesting and thoughtful opening ideas is not a goal, in fact the opposite is a goal.
A goal is to tap rich new terrains of opening ideas, rich enuf to challenge Reuben Fine’s famous nine opening principles (and the tenth about rooks that seemed too obvious to mention, when only the traditional setup S#518 is used). Only a new setup can do that.
In relative terms, all the traditional setup can do for us any more is, after perhaps 26 plies of repetition with other games, pass off early middlegame ideas as “opening novelties”.
When we eat barbeque ribs, the first couple bites are the best. Thick juicy bites of meat. After much knawing, we are reduced to picking thin strands of meat with our front teeth from the forgotten corners of the bone: just not as satisfying to as many people.
.
I heartily disagree: The entire point of Chess960 is to use various setups.
Now, on a personal note, I think its good practice to generate a single random setup for a round, and have every board play the same setup.
Any chance of getting Chess960 in the USCF Rulebook some day? Had someone telling me I had the wrong setup generation idea not long ago and couldn’t convince him different.
And how big an effort would it be for USCF to rate 960? I suppose it would have to be a separate number from the regular OTB rating, but is it really any different? I mean the whole idea was to get away from memorizing opening lines and having to think from move one. The game is the same otherwise, isn’t it? Would rating them together harm the regular rating?
Even though the pieces move the same, I think the game is different. Rating it as part of the regular rating system would harm the regular rating system. The rating system is based on how chess has been played for many years with the pieces on their normal squares. Opening preparation and what they do with the position is part of a player’s ability. Even though perhaps the goal of FRC is to eliminate opening prep as an element of strength, I don’t think you can mix results from FRC in with results achieved in regular chess. The ratings would not be an accurate indicator of performance.
it is also just unfair to players that have been doing their opening prep