I agree with the idea that rooks should be in their regular positions along with the king; This makes the castling rules much more intuitive than chess960. I think the asymmetric starting position is going to be pretty rough as this would lead to huge advantages. E.g. having 2 bishops next to each other is so much stronger than not.
Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
#12The idea of an asymmetric Chess starting position is very interesting, although it does introduce more risk of one side starting with a big advantage (perhaps this has been analyzed). I also like that in this variant, castling works like normal -- that is one of the most unintuitive aspects of Chess960.
> one side starting with a big advantage I have never played this variant of chess, but on the surface it seems that having both bishops on the same color would be a sizeable disadvantage. The other randomized pieces (queens and knights) can get to any square, so having two knights start on dark squares, for instance, doesn't seem to really matter.
The bishops are required to be on different colors.
Re: Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
#13Does this "reduce draws" purely because it randomly gives one side a small (or big) advantage? If so, that doesn't seem to be an improvement at all. It would be easy enough to test if one side having an advantage is common: have a chess engine play against itself many times using the same setup. The try a new setup. Find out what percentage of the time one side seems to have been given an advantage. (i.e. an advantag…
This was developed mostly for computer chess, where games are often played starting from preset positions, where one side already has a significant advantage. The top chess engines, when playing each other from the regular starting position, which is very equal, will almost always draw (especially in time controls where they have an increment of one second or more), so we humans have to force them to play lines that they would never go into so that the games aren't all draws (and while some games can be exciting and still drawn, that is not the case with most of the lines the engines will pick when playing from the start position).
This is essentially just a subset of the Chess960 positions that don't require any modification to the castling rule.
Re: Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
#14I don’t personally think reducing draws would improve the game at all
This is primarily for computer chess, where the draw rate is even higher than in super-GM level chess. It's an alternative to having engines play from a preset position where one side starts with a significant advantage, which is what usually happens in computer chess tournaments. It's essentially the subset of Chess960 positions that don't need modifications to the castling rule, and thus should work on all engines without requiring any changes to the code.
Re: Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
#15I don’t personally think reducing draws would improve the game at all
I don't think this variant is for playing, but for practicing tactical games against a computer.
Re: Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
#16The idea of an asymmetric Chess starting position is very interesting, although it does introduce more risk of one side starting with a big advantage (perhaps this has been analyzed). I also like that in this variant, castling works like normal -- that is one of the most unintuitive aspects of Chess960.
> one side starting with a big advantage I have never played this variant of chess, but on the surface it seems that having both bishops on the same color would be a sizeable disadvantage. The other randomized pieces (queens and knights) can get to any square, so having two knights start on dark squares, for instance, doesn't seem to really matter.
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Re: Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
#17I don’t personally think reducing draws would improve the game at all
Certainly not if it is done by randomly giving one player a substantial advantage.
Re: Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
#18Has anyone thought/experimented of a variant that works a bit like the starting phase of Risk: pawns are as they are classically, but players take turns in the beginning phase placing their other pieces in their respective bottom/upper file.
I've heard of that variant but I think it is very seldom played. I don't know if it has a name.
Re: Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
#19Chess960[0] aka Fischer Random aka "Freestyle Chess" (the last is a name chess.com has been using") is a fairly popular variant with 960 possible starting positions.
The way I'm interpreting this, 324 is different in that the rooks & kings are fixed, but the position is asymmetric.
Is it called 324 because there are 324 possible starting positions? Also, I'm inferring that this is popular in computer chess specifically, is there a reason for that?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
edit: there's a quote from the inventor in the wiki that answers my first question and sort of answers the second:
> This version has huge advantages over chess960. First, no special castling rules, any engine or GUI or human can play with no instruction after seeing the initial position. Second, since all but 18 of the 324 positions are asymmetrical, opening play should be much more interesting and complex. Third, the normal positioning of the rooks and kings and normal castling makes the game feel closer to normal chess. Fourth, matches of up to 648 games can be played with no repeat positions, generally enough for most purposes. Most important, no matter how many cores or how much time the engines get, there should be plenty of decisive games for the foreseeable future since many positions are at least not too far from the win/draw line.
Re: Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
#20How does this compare 'draw reduction' wise with
Chess480 (by John Kipling Lewis) or Chess18
https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/34852/chess480-why...
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1crd700/thoughts_on_...