Seirawan chess

Staggerlee, your experience draws me to the above questions.  What do you think of that?

To hsbgowd:

S-Chess certainly has the strategic element as well as tactical.  Remember that tactical opportunities arise from sound positions!  If you play positionally you won't get robbed tactically!  This is equally true in Seirawan Chess.

And as far as S-Chess being a game where the game is decided purely by who doesn't blunder, that will depend soley on the strength of the players, as it does in regular chess.  Games between novices will be determined by who hangs their queen and elephant, while games between stronger players will be decided by stength of calculation or who plays stronger positionally and commits fewer inaccuracies.  Basically just like in regular chess.

Is it possible to play this anywhere on the internet?

At the moment, no I don't think so.  Chess.com could be the first, should they choose!

I would love to see this, and would definitely play if offered the chance. My limited OTB experience with S-chess has been a lot of fun.

 Ah, thank you very much! That counts as your Christmas present.

to answer the post by hsbgowd.....the reason I like schess and think that it's more fun in some ways than classic chess is because you are literally in danger at any point of the game of being checkmated, and it adds tension to the game more quickly, rather than playing out the known opening lines before the action starts in classic chess (don't get me wrong, I still love classic chess) A piece that can fly to the other end of the board in a second, because it has the power of a rook or bishop, but cannot be blocked in because it has the powers of a knight can really keep you on your toes...I still haven't decided whether the new pieces are more powerful, less powerful, or equal to a queen, but.....they get the party started quickly, and disrupt many classical opening lines

Sounds exciting! Good to see all those who have played before have liked it. My preference would be to play it otb or online. But, I really do not have the patience to play in any other way.

Pros: (1) It is interesting, fun. (2) Two new types of pieces - H and E - open up a whole new vista of tactics and strategy.

Cons: (1) Two new pieces have to be designed, and its algorithms debugged, which might take much more time than was done in implementing Chess960 (observe here that no new piece is involved).

(2) A very small percentage of people play the Chess 960 - how many do you think would play Serawan Chess (it might have been considered if quite a large number of members participated in chess960 - that was not the case)? You can use your existing chess intuition to play 960 (no new piece involved) - you need to learn from scratch the behaviour of two new pieces in S-chess.

(3) Old (too much learning involved) and serious players (no serious tournaments) will definitely not play this variant.

(4) It is not economical to devote so many man-hours over something which will be used by only a tiny fraction of all the members.

Wow, I guess Robert isn't as old as I thought. (Hey, Robert, you should change your avatar, it's very misleading).

Update from erik today: You will all have to probably wait for another year as we are not sure Schess will attract much attention (and profits ). Currently, only a minority of the people play 960 and so adding Schess would not be worth the effort.

Ah, that's encouraging.  That sounds more like somewhere between a "Someday Maybe" and a "Someday Definitely" and a lot less like the "Never" response I had received before.

I'd still like to hear from someone with coding experience who could give us a ballpark estimate on how many man-hours we're talking about here.  I would never tell the staff they should break their backs creating something that will please a small number of people, and thus lose valuable time improving live chess and whatnot.

As for whether or not implementing S-Chess would attract much attention, I think that depends on how the site goes about doing it.  Yasser Seirawan has a website for the variant, and he's posted youtube videos talking about it, and they've gotten the house of staunton selling official pieces for the variant.  Imagine chess.com being mentioned on Yasser's website as the only online destination for playing Seirawan Chess, and a chess.com card or sticker or something that goes out with every seirawan chess set sold from house of staunton.  I think it could be big.

dsarkar,

You've identified some important obstacles, but I think a few of your observations are overstated. S-chess does have a steep learning curve, but not because learning the movement of the new pieces is difficult. The first time I played was with another S-chess rookie, and neither of us made one mistake as to how the hawk and elephant function. The real difficulty is in tactics and strategy, which is the whole point: to create a slightly more complex game that would reduce one's dependence on memorized lines.

As for experienced players, it's worth noting that this variant was developed by a GM in the hopes that other GMs would be among the players. The top players, who may have memorized lines far into the middlegame, are Seirawan's primary audience.

i'd also like to play s-chess here on chess.com!

just looked into s-chess, and it does sound like a logical step forward for the great game of chess. it's still chess... just with new, fascinating opportunities on the board.

S-chess is new to me as of two days ago, and it truly facinates me.  I like to play with the knight and having two extra pieces that move like a knight and a bishop, or a rook, sounds like a real challenge.  I serously doubt it would totally replace chess for me.  It would be a mental excerise, such as Khet.

As for a crowded board, that reminds me of when I was in the 7th grade and some boys were afraid of the volley ball, so the gym teacher made us play with a basket ball.  After a few games of that the volley ball was easy.  Same with a crowded board, after that a regular board would be easier, at least it seems tha it would be to me.

I purchased a set of hawk and elephants a couple of days ago.  Since I have no one, as of yet, to play s-chess against, I played against myself to get a feel of the game.  I truly enjoyed playing it.  It is just intriguing to me to be able to add pieces complicating the game.  

I read complaints on other threads about openings being so well known that chess is losing its appeal, well, throw in the hawks and elephants at unexpected times and that should liven up the openings fantastically. 

I also like s-chess because it is not necessary to purchase a different board.  To me, there are many pluses to s-chess.  I will not give up playing chess, but s-chess just has more chances for unexpected positions and challenges.  

I've never played Seirawan chess, but it has the makings of a fabulous game. As a novice programmer, I can tell that if I already had the code for regular chess, i could make this with minimal work. The only theoretical question is whether the site can afford it. I believe that having a new feature would increase membership, and make it the most competitive chess website so far. As you can tell just by looking at this forum, there is significant interest in the game.

Hm, 40 posts over two years, by about 10 posters ? Hardly constitutes an impressive amount of interest.

You seem well qualified though, being a novice to programming, novice to chess, and never played Seirawan chess, you look like an ideal person to hire for this task.

[COMMENT DELETED]

Now that I've had some rest and time to think about my reply to the previous post...

It was rude.

Now about Seirawan chess. It is fun. I would like to see it added as an interactive variant. I'm not even a novice programmer. I am a novice to this site and also chess.

The number of posts on a given topic rarely indicate positive interest but more accurately indicate dissatisfaction. But, if the number of posts about Seirawan chess must be high in order for it to be perceived as 'important' then I thank you Atos for adding to the number of posts on this topic even though your post had little substance. +1 for rudeness = +1 for Seirawan Chess

I have played Seirawan (Sharper) Chess many times - It has a wonderful flow and for those (novices up to master-level players) that I have shared the game with, it has been an enjoyable experience. Naysayers who have not played and comment negatively on variants neglect to understand the reason for variant tweaks - the point is not to replace the standard game -- that is the POINT for having a standard. Everyone who plays the standard comes into an understanding of chess and its wonderful qualities. Seirawan chess retains the feel of the standard and adds some 'vocabulary' for some creativeness in the game, just for fun (which is why most people play games anyway). As far as balance goes, there are 3 styles of single-move pieces (R, N, B) and 3 styles of combinative pieces (E, H, Q). The personal choices of defensive and offensive players can make for some very interesting games. I would like to see it here.