960 random thoughts

Anyone who's not playing it is only depriving themselves.  Makes standard chess seem stodgy, stolid, and boring. 

Standard chess is like this joke my father use to tell about a joke teller's convention - everyone at it already knew all the jokes so they would just yell out joke numbers and everyone would laugh.  Then someone yelled out a number and no one laughed and a visitor asked, "Why did no one laugh that time?" and a member said, "They didn't like how he told it."

In standard chess everyone already knows all the punchlines, and if you lose a game its because you haven't been hitting the books.

Even the greatest chess player of all time said as much, and his dying wish is that we all play 960, so I think we should comply.

Also 960 really lends itself to the analysis board,  just going through all possible combinations to find the best move.  Actually in any online chess game (960 or otherwise)  the analysis board is crucial,  and you can beat players much stronger than you just because you're spending a few extra minutes than them on the analysis board each move.

Already my 960 rating is nearly 300 points higher than my live chess rating,  and its because of the analysis board.  That is why live chess I think is really a better indication of your chess skill than online chess, contrary to what most want to assert in this forum.

Players under 2600 - 2700 don't get to use this argument.  However if chess isn't interesting to you it makes sense to move on, other popular games include monopoly and candy land, knock yourself out.

I checked your online profile to see if maybe you've had some bad luck at 960 and as it turns out you haven't played it all.  Thanks for your opinion.

#2:

And since all you play is bullet and blitz it looks like even Candyland is too long a game for you.

 it was honestly my mistake for posting here in the first place, you're entitled to your opinions, carry on.

I don't use analysis board.  For 960 or standard.

So tell me, in 960 are both players pieces separatly randomized or do they get mirror image positions?

Also if I could play livechess/speed chess I'd totally be into to trying it out...

I'm really surprised every time I hear that.  Think of how a chess program works - at its core its really simple:  just builds a tree examining scores of branches from a given position looking 10-20 moves deep (e.g. "if I do this then he can do this then I will do this, etc." - only looking at each opponent's best possible moves on any given level).

Of course it might take you 20-30 minutes to examine half the branches the computer looks at in only one second,  but in online chess you have 20-30 minutes per move, or as long as you want actually.  And if your opponent is only looking at a small fraction of the board configs you look at, or none at all, just doing everything in his head, he's at a huge disadvantage and might as well just play live chess.  Of course, I try to maintain the flow of the game if my opponent is actually online.

They get mirror images.  Actually I think 960 works better as online chess.  Its hard to imagine it as 1 minute chess, anyway. With 1 minute chess (blitz? bullet?) it seems players are just flying blind and relying on instant recognition of board configuration and I guess using some preset book opening strategy etc. - IOW in blitz or bullet, you're not really analyzing anything, just recognizing and reacting.  Whereas 960 is all analysis.  Its wild though to see someone ranked 1600 or higher in standard make colossal blunders in 960.  You have to analyze.

I think 960 would be awesome in blitz.  Maybe give players 1 minute beforehand to look at the set up and then play!  People wanna "outmaneuver" each other...this seems perfect, with no time wasted with 10 ply Sicilian moves.

I agree about 960 but I wouldn't scoff at standard chess. In my opinion they are essentially the same game. The standard position is one of the 960 possible positions but it is distinguished by the fact that it has been used by many strong players over centuries and the legacy they have left us deserves to be studied, including opening theory.

The standard chess skills and 960 skills are generally very closely corelated; it may just be that the reason you beat players in 960 who are higher rated than you in standard is that you spend a lot of time analyzing while they do not. I play 960 in online because it is not available in Live but I rarely use the analysis board and I don't spend very long thinking on a move. (So far I haven't lost a game of 960 here, although I am playing one now that is not looking very good.)

There is one thing I am curious about, everyone should have their highest rating shown in here, why does that not apply when the highest rating is in 960 ?

While I generally agree with the esteemed  Schachgeek I think opening principles play a more important and lasting strategic course in 960 then in quote regular chess. The discourse of 960 is sorting then chess knowledge. 960 does test your chess knowledge more then rote or database mirroring moves. What I hope and can not confirm is that there are less cheats in 960 then regular chess where they are a despised majority ;-( This I think was BF's basic premise that pure chess knowledge would out way databases or chess engine losers!

I've started playing chess 960 recently and find it an enjoyable alternative. One thing I like is getting to apply basic opening principles to the new configurations.

Good points.  I wonder if there's a tougher place to play for 960 addicts, from what you and Eberulf said the competition doesn't seem to be too serious/tough here.

As for variants myself, I've enjoyed a few.  Bughouse, crazyhouse, 3 checks (the person to deliver a 3rd check instantly wins, can go into an almost normal endgame but middlegames are very interesting), atomic chess, the one where one of your pieces can explode-but-forgot-it's-name chess, screen chess, dark chess, etc.  Never more than a few games though, more than any of them I like standard chess :)

I really like Afaf's idea for blitz 960, before the game starts both players get to look at the position for a minute or so and then begin!

I'm pretty sure 960 doesn't count for your highest rating because it's not chess (although nearly the same as you pointed out).  A site like chess.com that's spent a lot of energy and focus on promoting chess and having tools for users to get better at chess it's no surprise they don't let chess variant ratings count in that way.  That they even have 960 as an option is a testament to how closely related chess and chess960 are really.

False.

I don't think it's necessary to be so critical of standard chess in order to make an argument in favor of Chess960.

I honestly didn't think anyone would take it personally. 

it took me 10 seconds literally to find the following quotes:

"I like to play Chess960. [...] I get bored from playing openings like the Slav over and over again. I think that in about 15 or 20 years we will only be playing Chess960."

-- Shakhriyar Mamedyarov

"I love chess, and I didn't invent Fischerandom chess to destroy chess. I invented Fischerandom chess to keep chess going. Because I consider the old chess is dying, or really it's dead. A lot of people have come up with other rules of chess-type games, with 10x8 boards, new pieces, and all kinds of things. I'm really not interested in that. I want to keep the old chess flavour. I want to keep the old chess game. But just making a change so the starting positions are mixed, so it's not degenerated down to memorization and prearrangement like it is today."

-- Bobby Fischer

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I vote we change the name of chess to "chess1" and chess960 to  just "chess".

Eberulf, I don't know how you leapt from my post to people taking things personally.

The Fischer quote makes me chuckle, it seems driven more by his own arrogance than reality.  I'm not certain the date on that quote, but I'm guessing it was 30 some years ago. If chess were dead, how do we have all the amazing games of Kasparov, Topalov, Carlsen, Anand, Kramnik, etc.

I suppose time will tell on Mamedyarov's quote. But I have my suspicions that chess will still be as popular in 15 to 20 years as it is today. I suspect that chess960 will be much more popular than it is now.

In the early 1900s masters thought they understood chess so well that there were only a few playable positions.  As understanding kept progressing though more and more positions were found to be "playable" and the QGD wasn't the death of chess after all.

Fischer, although a brilliant player, should be taken with a grain of salt when not OTB.  He called chess dead in the 70s, but part of his illness was after becoming the best to do away with chess altogether so he wouldn't have to live in fear of losing anymore.  That he retired immediately after winning the WC match is not a surprise, and I say that with no ill will, I'm sure it was a merciful retirement.

Nakamura has a quote "chess is dead" given early in 2000s, but more than not quitting he is spending tons of time and energy to progress in it, so what did he mean exactly?

There's nothing wrong with liking 960, but seems like you're trying to enforce, or at least prove a personal preference of 960 over standard chess.  Not only is this not possible, there's no need to do it.  Chess and 960 are both enjoyable games either way you look at it.

Loomis:

"The Fischer quote makes me chuckle, it seems driven more by his own arrogance than reality.  I'm not certain the date on that quote, but I'm guessing it was 30 some years ago."

It was from a June 27, 1999 radio interview.

Here's a more recent one:

"[Capablanca] wanted to change the rules already, back in the twenties, because he said chess was getting played out. He was right. Now chess is completely dead. It is all just memorization and prearrangement. It’s a terrible game now. Very uncreative."

 - Bobby Fischer - Radio Interview, October 16 2006 [4]

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer