The Best Starting Positions In Freestyle Chess

In normal chess, White has a small advantage in the opening at the start of every game. Because White can move first, engines like Stockfish give White an edge of about 0.25, an advantage, but well within the drawing margin. However, in Freestyle Chess (also called Fischer Random and Chess960), the starting position changes from game to game, and so does White's advantage.

I've asked GM Rafael Leitao to help explain the best and worst positions to draw at the start of a Freestyle Chess game.

• White's Best Starting Positions According To Stockfish
• Black's Best Starting Position According To Stockfish
• The Best And Worst Starting Positions In Real Games
• What Does A Stockfish Evaluation Mean In Practice?

White's Best Starting Positions According To Stockfish

If you're able to rig the drawing before a round of Freestyle Chess and choose the best starting position according to Stockfish, you're going to want to pick one of these:

Position 604

Let's see what Leitao has to say about arguably the best of all 960 positions for White, with an edge of about 0.80. The main issue for Black is that the g-pawns are vulnerable, and White gets to strike first. Notice that even in our high-level model game, White loses nearly the whole advantage on the very first move. Freestyle Chess is tough!

Position 935

Even Leitao has trouble understanding why this position has a similar evaluation to the one before it. If White wants to demonstrate the advantage in practice, it's essential to bring the a1-rook into the game quickly.

Black's Best Starting Position According To Stockfish

We've seen how some Freestyle starting positions are significantly harder for Black than in standard chess. Fortunately for the second player, there are also some positions that are nearly perfectly equal, despite White's first move. 

Position 225

In this position, neither side has a weakness, and both players can castle quickly. That's why White's first move advantage is only worth 0.02, negligibly better than pure equality. 

The Best And Worst Starting Positions In Real Games

It turns out that in practice, the engine evaluation of the starting position doesn't mean much. Even strong grandmasters rarely find the best first move in Freestyle. As a result, Freestyle results are closer to 50-50 than standard chess is.

In standard games on Chess.com, the average results are 51.7% for White vs. 48.3% for Black. In Freestyle, White scores an average of 50.5%, but it depends somewhat on the starting position. 

Position 91

The best scoring starting position for White is this one, with a score of 51.7%, matching that of standard chess. What's unique about position 91 is that none of the pawns on the a- and b-files are defended, so it's easy for the first move advantage to lead to a strong initiative. Check out Leitao's notes:

If the best starting position for White only scores 51.7%, it's not surprising that some starting positions actually score better for Black! It's possible that after enough games, White's first move will lead to at least a tiny edge in every starting position, but after more than 20,000 games on Chess.com in every position, 62 out of the 960 have results slightly in Black's favor. 

Position 712

This setup scores the best for Black out of all 960, with White scoring only 49.5% against Black's 50.5% in over 22,000 games.

What Does A Stockfish Evaluation Mean In Practice?

We have seen that the best positions according to the engine are not the best scoring positions in practice, so how much does the engine evaluation matter? I ran a regression on over 21 million games played in Freestyle Chess on Chess.com to determine how much an evaluation edge in a position mattered in deciding game results.

As you might expect, there is a positive correlation between the Stockfish-approved better positions and how well White scores, but it's likely a much smaller effect than you would think. 

This chart indicates that on average, for every +1 advantage (a position that Stockfish would expect to win and draw at equal rates, scoring 75%.), White scores only 0.4% better in human games. Considering that none of the starting positions in Freestyle have much better than a 0.8 advantage for White, this is a negligible difference. It may be helpful to note that White scores 51.7% in games on Chess.com in standard chess and doesn't surpass that by more than a tenth of a percent in any of the 960 starting positions in Freestyle Chess.

It's safe to conclude that while the starting position in Freestyle Chess has a significant impact on how the game will play out, and would likely alter results in engine games, when humans play Freestyle, the starting positions hardly matter in terms of results. The game is simply too complicated for anyone, even Carlsen, to understand how to convert a favorable position to victory.

Have you tried freestyle chess? What's your favorite way to start a game? Let us know in the comments!