Chess960 II
by zenquaker
Back in July Alexander Grischuk came out in favor of Chess960, but only using 200-300 positions, excluding the “absurd” positions. Ilya Levitov (FIDE Vice President) echoed this, saying Chess960 should be played excluding “absurd” or “disharmonious” positions. I thought this was an interesting idea. I asked around on some Chess forums dedicated to Fischer Random/Chess960, trying to find out what people thought counted as an “absurd” or “disharmonious” position. Almost nobody answered. I think I got four replies on two websites, only one of which answered the actual question.
I was still interested, so I started looking at different possibilities of absurd positions and how many Chess960 starting positions matched those possibilities. I also started looking at definitions of similar in terms of matching Chess960 positions with the standard Chess starting position. This developed into a spreadsheet of all the positions and which criteria they met. Eventually I added some other things to the spreadsheet, like the numbers for the positions in different numbering schemes, and the full Forsyth-Edwards Notation for the positions (both traditional and Shredder style). I now think of it as a Chess960 almanac, a somewhat useful tool if you’re analyzing Fischer Random starting positions. I’d been waiting for a good place to put it up on the web, and now I’ve got this blog, so here it is: Chess960 Almanac.
Of course, I could probably count the number of people in the world interested in this on both hands even if you chopped off all my fingers. That seems to be the fate of most of my projects these days.
Zen, thanks for starting a blog on Chess960 and sharing your thoughts. Just one food for thought on the labeling of “absurdness “. I personally have not found an absurd position. The elite traditional players say that some positions are “absurd”, but there may be an alternative explanation for why they say that.
Why do people label things that are neutral? It is simply that us humans unconsciously compare the Chess960 start positions with our memories of the traditional setup and make a biased judgement.
None of the Chess960 positions are actually absurd and this is what Bobby Fischer it’s inventor also presumably noticed. Yes they are imperfect. Yes they can be awkward. Yes, some of the positions are a bit unbalanced. But the object of Chess960 play is that we try to make the “imperfect” better. We do not come from a mentality of starting from a perfect position. Even the elite traditional chess players make this mistake in how they think about 960.
In Chess960, we actually learn to play all 960 positions. It is a mistake of traditional chess thinking to dwell on any particular start position for more than is necessary to get the feel of the position and how it might apply to other start positions theoretically.
In this way Chess960 is a lot of fun and we are searching for truth, as Bobby put it himself.
Here is my blog on it:
http://chess960jungle.blogspot.com/
And here is the best Chess960 blog on the web thus far:
http://chess960frc.blogspot.com/
Enjoy Chess960
and play Chess with fresh eyes!
Harry,
Thanks for the kind words and interesting opinions. Be warned, though. This is not a blog about Chess960, it’s a blog about my life, of which Chess960 is a part. If you only want the Chess stuff, look for category = Chess.
I think you make a good point about absurdness, but finding interesting subsets of the 960 start positions appeals to my analytical nature. I have come up with two, and I will be posting about them in the near future, as soon as I can find a good way to display them. After that my hope is to get into some statistical analysis of Chess960 openings, which you may find more to your interest.
-Ichabod the Zen Quaker