Is traditional chess, as Bobby Fischer said, all played out and finished.  For myself and many others, it is not, and never will be.  But as for the top players of the future, will they move onto Chess960, or some other variation to keep things from growing stagnant?  What are your thoughts?

Hasn't happened yet (and everybody's been saying it's played out for the past 100 years). Take a glance through Watson's two books on modern chess strategy if you really think there are no creative possibilities left. Better yet, take a look at the following game (one of the examples from his Chess Strategy in Action):

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1289099

(Holy smoke.)

It's no where close to being played out but opening theory has advanced to such an extent that many games at the highest levels are not decided by skill but rather by preparation.  I think eventually you'll start to see more tournaments played with balloted openings (I think that's what they're called) in an effort to keep the game interesting and to force players to rely on their skill instead of their pre-game opening preparation.

Wow!  Great game.  I didn't use the word smoke in my initial reaction.

Chess can become really boring and played out if you aren't willing to expand your game and try out new strategies/openings. For the most part, chess is mostly memorization. I find chess can become very tiresome in the sense that you are replaying the same openings and it isn't you thinking or finding a solution on your own, you are moving because it is preordained, but I wouldn't say it is completely played out...once you leave the book openings you truly get to the good stuff - learning by discovery.

I believe that a chess960 computer program would be much more diffilcult to beat than a normal chess computer program.  Has anyone here, played against a chess960 computer program?