Chess 960 and Capablanca Chess

Has anyone on chess.com thaught of adding capablanca chess and chess 960 to Live Chess???? because ive gotten interested in both variations and would like to play agaisnt someone..... 

so has anyone thought of that???

I really didn't find the Capablanca Chess format very capable of ever really catching on.  But, it would be a thrill to get a chance to play it a few times.

Capablanca Chess is famous, but primarily due to the name, not due to the number of players.  Finding a live site that supported it would be difficult, and finding someone at that live site who would play it would be harder.

However, I can offer a suggestion that is better than nothing.  If you want to play Capablanca Chess against a computer, go to zillionsofgames.com and check out that program.   There is a Capablanca's Chess implementation for Zillions.

Really, anyone who likes Chess variants should definitely check out that program.

I have never heard of Casablanca Chess, will have to look in to it...

 That's Capablanca Chess, not Casablanca Chess.

Named after Jose Capablanca, world Chess champion in the 1920s, who invented it.

I've never heard of that either!  

Capablanca chess is chess where there are 2 more pieces on each side...... one is the archbishop(mixture of bishop and knight.... can checkmate by itself) and the chancellor(mixture of rook and knight....)

Yeah, I looked it up on Wikipedia the other day. It sounds confusing to me if anything, plus it would need a bigger board and extra pieces. So as I am nowhere near being GM quality at 'normal' chess, I have no fear of Draw Death happening to me in my lifetime. So I'll give that variation a miss for now, and just try and improve myself at 'normal' Chess. 

You do learn something new every day though!

I run an ICS that supports Capablanca Chess. There are no people there, of course, also because I never advertize it. (I use it mainly for computer tournaments.) As a graphical client, you can use WinBoard to connect to it. The ICS is at IP address 80.100.28.169 (port 5000). You can als connect to it through an ascii client like Telnet, but that is really primitive.

As for software that plays Capablanca Chess: Zillions is a wonderful program, because it can do so many variants, but this generality is very detrimental to its strength. There are much stronger programs for Capablanca Chess. E.g. Nebiyu, Joker80, SMIRF, TJchess10x8, Fairy-Max, which all run under WinBoard, and most are free.

Cool stuff.  I had heard of Winboard, but I didn't know it had such variety.

WinBoard supports more than 18 variants, including Chinese, Japanese and Thai Chess.

I would love to hear the Grandmasters comment on 960 and Capablanca variants.  Most seem like they enjoy 960, but most haven't even played CapaChess.

There is also a variant called Seraiwan Chess after the American Grandmaster.  It introduces the same pieces as Capa's but they have different names and operate on a normal 64 square board.  They are called the Elephant and the Hawk (Serawan hated the names Marshall and Chancellor) and the enter the game whenever a piece, any piece, leaves the 8th rank.  They hosted a tournament with some decent chess players some odd years back, you can find it on youtube.

Indeed. WinBoard also supports Seirawan Chess, and the engine that is supplied with it (Fairy-Max) can play that too. In this variant WinBoard does not use the symbols for Chancellor and Archbishop it normally used, but indeed an Elephant and a Hawk.

These pieces start next to the board, and to gate them in you just have to select them there, and then do the move with a back-rank piece.

thats kind of surprising that the Seirawan version is more visible.  Personally I find the "Hawk" an odd piece name.  The elephant is what the bishop is actually called in Russian too, I think.  Wouldn't something like General work?  Considering there is a King and Queen the name Prince seems fitting also, but I wouldn't really like that name either.  

In ancient Arabic Chess Bishops moved differently from today, and were called Elephants. In many languages that still sticks. (E.g. I know that the Spanish name is Alfil, which is Arabic for Elephant. In no language I know other than English the piece is referred to as a Bishop or any other kind of religious person. In French it is called a Fool, in Dutch and German a Runner.) The Rook has always moved as it does now, but was originally called a Chariot. In fact Rook is Persian for Chariot, so the name has stuck in English there. In most other languages it is called Tower.

The B+N and R+N pieces have many names (Centaur, ArchBishop, Cardinal, Warlord, Hawk for B+N, Champion, Chancellor, Marshall, General, Elephant for R+N). From the way the piece is handled by engines I think that 'Dancer' would be the most apt name for the B+N piece, while 'Bulldozer' would not be such a bad description of the R+N.

I guess Hawks were couriers at ancient times so maybe it does work.  And movement wise it would match the Bishop Knight combo a little bit.  I would suggest Hawk and General for the pieces myself.

I agree it would be pretty awesome to have Capablanca chess on chess.com Live.

Yeah, I do too

How much is an archbishop worth? How much is a chancellor worth?