What is advanced chess?

Advanced Chess (sometimes called cyborg chess or centaur chess) was first introduced by grandmaster Garry Kasparov, with the objective of a human player and a computer chess program playing as a team against other such pairs.^[1]

Many Advanced Chess proponents have stressed that Advanced Chess has merits in:

• increasing the level of play to heights never before seen in chess;
• producing blunder-free games with the qualities and the beauty of both perfect tactical play and highly meaningful strategic plans;
• giving the viewing audience a remarkable insight into the thought processes of strong human chess players and strong chess computers, and the combination thereof.

A variation or superset of Advanced Chess is freestyle chess, where consultation teams are also allowed. It is common for "regular" Advanced Chess single man/machine teams (also called "centaur play", to differentiate between pure-man or pure-machine play) to take part in freestyle tournaments. Freestyle tournaments are frequently more informal than regular chess tournaments, even though the level of play can be significantly higher.

I am skeptical of the idea of Advanced Chess for one simple reason:  it supposes that a human + machine team is stronger than the machine working by itself.  With chess engines reaching estimated strengths of 3300+ nowadays, it's dubious that even Magnus Carlsen could improve on the engine's analysis.

I agree advanced chess is lame and bogus too. So I don't think that it would be such a big deal to have a free castling tournament for the big boys, to see what they think about it.

I'm not particularly interested in centaur games, but I've heard that if you try to get by on engine analysis alone on the ICC you'll get eaten alive.  It's not something I plan on getting into any time soon, but it's interesting to think that they could advance chess theory beyond what computers alone can give us.

Lame so incredibly lame. Part of the beauty of chess is how the great players took advantage of blunders. The funny thing is sometimes while playing through these games,I didn't even know they were blunders until the refutation was played! Advanced chess seems sterile to me.

I just think that it's time to take a closer look at free castling.

Puzzle!

Another puzzle!

I wonder what the elite players would think of free castling.

They'd probably think it childish. The way professional cricket players would find the 'one-bounce one-hand' rule childish.

Free castling could breathe fresh new ideas and life into chess without completely changing the character of the game.