Bring Back Free Castling!

I'd love to see someone sponsor a free castling tournament or even better a high level tournament to test-play this rule and to see the player's thoughts and the games it produces! It's not as crazy as some would think, I mean just look at the advanced chess tournaments that've been held even Kasparov played in these! And in my opinion I think advanced chess is in some ways more radical than free castling.

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.

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.

Let's just stay with the current castling move. Changing at this stage would cause too much confusion. 

Here's the article link to Bring Back Free Castling!!

http://www.chesscafe.com/text/kibitz31.txt

Free Castling is a reform that would be well worth
adopting to reduce the impact of theory and computers on the game
as it is played now. This would send publishers in a scurry to find
books of old Italian games as 99.9% of current opening theory
would immediately become redundant. 

i have been playing twenty years.. and this would be awesome...... just imagine....soo many more possibilities.... the only thing i hate about chess is... there is too much written material on the subject... WHICH MEANS TOO MANY PEOPLE MEMORIZING INSTEAD OF PLAYING OVER THE BOARD.. THIS WOULD INJECT SOME MUCH NEEDED NEW LIFE AND NEW VARIATIONS INTO THE GAME...the irony is, even though i would support the rule change.. i probably would castle the same way for the first few years.. lmao.

This would make an excellent addition to Fischer Random.

https://www.chessvariants.com/diffmove.dir/freecastling.html

Thank you for the link.