I didn't get the castling(I understand where the pieces go. BUt, I tried to castle in a game and it wouldn't let me.)

Is it just all the same rules as in regular chess for castling(can't be in check, pieces out of the way etc)?

Yes.

Chess 960 on live would be cool...

after reading all of this - lets simplify it by asking another question - is it Christmas or Xmas?? But i thought there wasn't supposed to be stuff on here concerning religion!! And, yes, that is what all those posts boiled down to!

Personally I think Chess960 should be termed as Chess959. The one vaiation is the normal chess where we have profound opening analysis.

I want to play chess960 - how can I do this?

The Chess 960 is already in team matches. It is amazing.

I would like to see other chess variants (need not be approved by FIDE). I understand the difficulty in implementing in chess.com. At least I would like to see it as "unrated" matches for other variants. It will be fun too.

chess960 makes you think more, and could be better

It definitely throws a lots of different positions and few new patterns.

Thanks for explaining this! I was recently wondering about how it is calculated.

I seem to be doing ok in 960 so far.

Does it not always allow you to castle in both directions?  Play started with Rooks on H1 and E1, King on G1.  It will allow me to do the short castle with the rook on H1, but it won't let me perform a castle with the rook on E1.  

Not only am I finding this odd, but it's killing me right now as part of my plan in the game was to work the castle that direction.

It took me forever to figure out how to castle lol.

Jailbyrd, you should be able to castle in both directions. Without seeing the exact position it's hard to figure out why castling isn't working for you.

"Does it not always allow you to castle in both directions?  Play started with Rooks on H1 and E1, King on G1.  It will allow me to do the short castle with the rook on H1, but it won't let me perform a castle with the rook on E1.  

Not only am I finding this odd, but it's killing me right now as part of my plan in the game was to work the castle that direction."

There has always been a piece on f1 (if I've got the right game), needs to be clear between the King and Rook.

On the point of Castling in Chess960... I wrote a long article about it and how I think it fails to both be intuitive and to actually fit the historical progression of Chess.

In that article I offered up a better system for Castling that would be obvious and intuitive to anyone familiar with Chess.  Chess960 is, however, already rigidly established and the Chess960 community was unfavorable to the idea of changing the existing rules.  As such I created my own variant which matches Chess960 in every way save the Castling rules.  

It's called Chess480 (for tactical reasons) and the rules for Castling can be summed up almost exactly as you would in regular Chess.  The King moves 2 spaced, the Rook leaps the King.  (The only exception is when the King is on the b or g file, when the King and Rook simply transpose positions.)

I've found several sites have adopted this rule simply because it's easier to program, which was not on of the benefits I imagined when I invented it.  

That is so cool!

Hi eric;  When does chess960 get a separate listing for their particular teams....my team only has interest in playing with other chess960 teams...but it requires a little road trip to find the chess960 enthusiasts ....can they become a subset of the groups?  Kind of like their separated out in the leaders-boards!

I just recently set up a position on Chessmaster X for Chess960 and it was a very interesting game between two GMs. White didn't move until it was done analyzing for about 11-12 minutes, and it was a very interesting game, almost 2 hrs and 15 minutes with each player on 90 minutes. I have yet to try it here though.

Chessmaster X is Chessmaster 10. And it came out in 2004, but now Chessmaster Grandmaster edition is out(pretty much the same as CM X, but for Vista)..try Best Buy or Amazon. It should only be about 15 or 20 dollars. :)

Paul,

In Chessmaster X, I set up the board myself in the "Set-Up Position" Mode. I'm deciding where to put the pieces myself, click "Next",  pick two players, and time, and sit back and see what happens  :)