The History of 4 Player Chess and Where it is Today
No game analysis today. Just read, watch, laugh, and enjoy!
*Interesting* games:
https://www.chess.com/variants/4-player-chess/game/6490908
Oh wait, the archive is broken again! I guess this is the only game you get (for now)!
The game of 4 player chess has always been an intriguing one. Whether it be the preface of tactical exploitation in FFA or sacrificial attacking plays in Teams, 4pc has much to offer. But it's not just the game that's interesting—a whole community revolves around 4pc and its odd yet fundamentally rigorous game mechanics. Granted, our community is much, much smaller than that of the whole player base Chess.com possesses, not to mention that we've hit rock bottom in popularity many times by this point, but we're slowly making a comeback—though it might take a couple more years!
So what's all the fuss about? You may be asking. My job in this blog is to take you on a ride.
Fasten your seatbelts, everyone, because you're about to step foot into a roller coaster of a journey!
The Centuries-old History of Chess
Before we jump in, I wanted to touch a little on the historic components of ancient board games that eventually evolved into what we now know today as the game of chess. The roots of the game are still being debated by historians, so much so that people are still not completely sure how chess could've evolved from the four player dice rolling game of Chaturaji in India to its contemporary home on Twitch.
That being said, there's a lot of lore here in the form of ancient manuscripts and artifacts that helped us discover, at least to an extent, the true beginnings of chess.
The most noticeable debates began way back in the 18th and 19th centuries, when a British diplomat named Hiram Cox made a claim that 4 player chess was the "real" original game, not the 2 player chess that we see Magnus and Hikaru botch with their double Bongclouds all over the place.
The main source of evidence for his claim was an ancient manuscript, which he put forth as dating back to 3000 B.C. that he obtained from a British Bengal. The script itself was an ancient Indian account of writing from the text Bhavishya Purana, which in essence is a group of works detailing prophecies for the future rooting from the Purana genre of Hinduism.
Cox used this manuscript to formulate an intricate and detailed article which he then used as counterevidence to another article, written by Sir William Jones, and all-in-all started a long debate about whether Chaturaji (the 4p version) or Chaturanga (the 2p version) was, in fact, the original version.
Portrait of Sir William Jones. I couldn't find a pic of the Cox guy lol
A professor by the name of Duncan Forbes later extended the debate into more so a theory (which was later debunked); this idea became known as the Cox-Forbes Theory. He writes about the theory in The History of Chess, published in 1860, and he seemed to agree that the Bhavishya Purana is apparently more than 4800 years old at the time of writing his book. Where he differs, however, is when he claims that it is in fact Chaturanga that is the 4 player version and that Chaturaji is a "misnomer"; he thought that "chaturaji" was the root word that eventually evolved into "checkmate". Nevertheless, he was wrong on that part, and these ancient games are still played even today. You can check them out yourself on the Variants server:
The theory was eventually refuted as the Puranas were discovered to date back to only 500 B.C. and not 3000 B.C. as claimed by Cox and later by Forbes. Other historians also began to make certain revolting findings (such as the allegation that Forbes did not use the Purana as his evidence, but rather the Tithitattva of Raghunandana, which was actually written in 1500 A.D. and not 3000 B.C) that ended up being abysmal for Forbes's reputation and ultimately ended up in the Cox-Forbes theory being rejected.
TL;DR: The "real" origins of chess are from an ancient Indian 2 player game called Chaturanga, and not the 4 player version Chaturaji.
Interestingly, both versions of the game were luck-based, as moves were determined by dice rolls much like you would see in today's "around-the-board" games like Monopoly. However, due to religious and legal reasons related to gambling, the component of dice rolling was removed and the game became purely skill-based.
Progressing along the timeline by around 200 years and Chess.com is born. Fast forward another decade and a half, and in 2016 the first online version of 4pc was "created by a university student named John Flickinger (@battleMind24)" (@ChessMasterGS, The Forgotten Feature, 2023). John produced a site called HelloChess. His creation reached the eyes and ears of CEO Erik Allebest and ended up being integrated as a novel feature on Chess.com, becoming available to players within a few days of its announcement.
Things didn't start out so well; before the applications for a devoted admin team were sent out, staff themselves were forced to moderate the servers. Regardless, they were quite enthusiastic about it, with staff becoming more involved with the game as time went on.
However, after a dedicated admin team was set in stone, staff began to slowly drift away from the new variant they created. The last major intervention of Chess.com staff was seen in the first ever Teams W4PCC, with two staff members and Alexandra Botez commentating the games on Twitch. After that, only a few staff members "stayed" with the community; the rest seemed to finish their work with 4pc and start new projects to successfully scale the rest of the exponentially-growing website.
The first ever W4PCC, commentated by WFM Alexandra Botez and GM Jon Ludvig Hammer.
Soon, their devotion to 4pc became little to none, with only a few very committed staff members, along with the wonderful admin team, keeping the servers and the community alive. But up until before the pandemic struck, popularity was continually booming.
I myself started playing 4pc over 4 years ago, after I realized I had nothing to accomplish in regular chess because of the nature of my situation. This was my first ever 4pc game.
Yeah, I was pretty garbage.
FFA didn't really interest me; maybe it's because I lost that game brutally. Either way, the next game I played lit a spark inside me. That teams game just felt...different. We blundered like 5 times that game, but winning that first 4pc game felt different to when I won my first regular chess game 4 years before that. I became sucked into teams—you could even say I got addicted—and that's what I decided to focus on for pretty much the next 2 to 3 years.
Slowly, as time went on, I got better, playing with stronger players and some of the more "famous" people—"celebrities", we called them—and now, 4 years later, I'm here, as a variants admin.
The World 4 Player Chess Championships and The 4 Player Chess League
Every year, usually scattered throughout, the World 4 Player Chess championships are held in the two main categories: FFA and Teams. We also used to have a separate one for Bullet FFA, but I assume that got discontinued. Or maybe it died out because of the pandemic and variants merge. In any case, numerous players have participated in these large-scale events, ranging from the noobiest of noobs, to the amateurs, all the way up to the elites.
The 4 Player Chess League, on the other hand, was founded quite recently, dating back to a little over a year ago. Created on the 8th of July, 2022, a new competition was born. With popular 4pc streamer Radon leading the League, things kicked off to a great start.
A major distinguishing factor between the W4PCC and the 4PCL is that they are separate events completely. They are directed and managed by different people. Played in dissimilar fashion, with one consisting of Round Robin and Double Elimination style brackets and the other of division-based pairings, these two competitions strive for the same end goal yet could not be any more distinct.
The head of the W4PCC is Luke Romanko (@fourplayerchess). He directs all 4pc FFA, Teams, and Speed Championships almost single-handedly. Players usually join qualifier arenas, and, based on their performance in those arenas, will be eliminated or will move on to the next round. Successful players play in best-of-N matches against their opponents, and the highest scoring players keep moving up the competition until the finals, where a champion is decided.
idiot twitch embed doesnt work here is link
The 2021 W4PCC Teams Finals.
Luis Ignacio (@Eyeofthetiger1204) and Carlos Gabriel (@carlosgabriel1234) defeat the defending world champions Lars Johan Brodtkorb (@icystun) and Abhinav Martha (@abhinavmartha123).
Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, the 4PCL is a season-based competition led by @Radon, with "Officers" such as @LosChess, @Matttin, @martinaxo, and more, working behind the scenes to create fair divisions (based on rating) and timezone-compatible pairings. Players rack up points based on the number of wins, draws, and losses they have in total, and at the end of the season, the top 16 duke it out in the Playoffs.
The Official 4PCL Website.
Ultimately, while the formats may be unrelated, both competitions are good for determining a player's relative skills, based on pre-determined benchmarks and thresholds. As you might expect, the elite players, typically rated above 3000 in FFA and above 2500 in Teams, are the most common winners of these events. Reigning champions come back every time to defend their title, but every now and then, an underdog sweeps the competition and takes the throne.
In the past, however, more than just the "standard" FFA and Teams championships have taken place. For example, in late 2020, an FFA Antichess (now Giveaway) Championship was announced and played through, with @a1t19 driving his way to the finish line and being declared champion. More recently, in the 4PCL, a side event for 4p variants called the Variants League (shocker) was inaugurated, which I, myself, hosted, but we didn't get a lot of traffic. The whole thing...kinda just diminished into inactivity.
Perhaps the most popular 4 player variant of all time, Chaturaji, had a knack for being fun and unique, while also being relatively fast-paced compared to standard FFA and more beginner friendly. There was a time, however, when there were hundreds, even thousands of players playing this game, but not in its standard blitz time control that we see today.
Welcome to the world of Hyper Fiesta, a place where hyber fiesta GOD @BoxJellyfishChess hibernates, coming out of his den every once in a while for a hunt and mass killing, but also a place where players all around the world compete in week-long arenas.
The main time control this was played in was 15 seconds with no increment hyperbullet. Players would start in the Chaturaji RNBK position (rook in the corner, followed by the knight, then bishop, then king) rather than the BNRK position (which was proven to be significantly disadvantageous to Blue and Green).
One of the most prevalent—and by far the strongest—players was none other than IM Eddy Tian himself. Renowned as the GOAT of Fiesta, @BoxJellyfishChess was capable of going on even 20 game win streaks before finally losing a game, and his peak rating before the merge was something along the lines of 2970, a rating which, to this day, nobody else has come even close to—at least, not from playing solely Hyper Fiesta. You would see a lot of 2800+ players back then, but those ratings came from Hyper FFA and Hyper Teams and all other hyper variants being combined into one rating category for hyperbullet.
It was around this time that other strong regular chess players such as GM Arjun Erigaisi and GM Nihal Sarin joined the party and started grinding the all-week Fiesta arenas. They were also prevalently observed in the Hyper Teams environment, where they would only partner each other and destroy everyone else. But we'll leave that for another section.
Most players, however, did not have the blessing of being titled. And by most, I mean around 99.99% of players.
Back in those days anyone could easily get 24-, 2500, just by grinding out the all-week arenas. And then you had some super good players like @Valjuir who never even crossed 2400. Life's not fair. Oh well. Here's a list of as many prominent players I could up with:
@JkCheeseChess @ChessMasterGS @ScatteredWealth (sup @Duck) @BoxJellyfishChess @PoisonDartFrogChess @qfcbv (@Chat_Banned) @Valjuir @The_Ultra_Trap @Max_Wolfe @Hyperallweekchallenger @ChallengerHypFiesta @travisqiu @1Username2Awesome3 @pknm @WarQueen21 @I_am_mEATING_pieces @DocZomboss @GMdsgchess2020
@kingandqueen2017 @Savagefire @cosoriop @shdhrb11 (now @EZ2468) @MightyKnight35 @TheOGflame @chessmaster72111 @OneAboveAll2 @N_A_V_A @MacBozo @Troodon2011 (now @ForgottenIsle??? well his new acc is @hmm-maybe-this-one but idk why he changed his username then closed) @hest1805 @GustavKlimtPaints @yoga779 @home163 @dell1506 @Testdam @Grazic66 @FatBlobbyKing @harbbee (he went through like 5 accounts so idk what his new username is now) @JamirMoneyMir @NathanHan3669 (no wonder I felt like I knew you!) @Chess_Master_325 @Pikauros13Sunny @YidingL1 @stachusiu @poT1reveS @Night-Rider_chess8987 @np86 @LUCIANOBONFICO LMAOAOOAAOAOOAOAAOA
yeah thats all i can remember so if one of you bozos see this and you arent mentioned just tell me ig ill put you in
Someone had the brilliant idea to start a pfp civil war between the so-called "Frogs" and the "Pigs". Basically, if you changed your pfp to a tree frog, you would be part of the Frog army, and vice versa for Pigs.
Well, except for the fact that the Pigs were actually Minecraft and Roblox pigs. But that doesn't matter.
The reason why I called it a civil war is not only because it WAS (4pc players fighting 4pc players), but because the turnout was much like the American Civil War; the Frogs destroyed the Pigs. Tripling the Pigs in number, the Frogs filled up almost all the Hyper Fiesta All-Week queues and destroyed the Pigs in battle. Our almighty Frog leader, @BoxJellyfishChess, went up against the Pigs'...co-presidents? @ChessMasterGS, @qfcbv and some other rando I don't remember.
Okay...actually, they were holding up pretty well—until Box double-agented. He transferred "ownership" of the Frog army to @PoisonDartFrogChess (now @frog, but he also played on @H3dgehogChess) and jumped from the Frog army to the Pig army.
And then two weeks later he destroyed the Pig club (yes, they actually had a club wtf). It's a long story, but I guess I'm here to tell you it.
Anyway, a few months later, the war ends, with the Frogs coming out victorious. That's a little bit of history for you.
Introducing the newest Apple product, the iDot. Encoded with high quality stupidity, the iDot is our novel take on the current situation with our society. We have carefully examined the mental states of players and, based on our experimental data, have accurately gauged the relative necessity of players to possess an iDot. This is not just a device; it is a title, an indicator of status. Players who possess the iDot will be valued much lower higher than the regular peasants that play the baby 4pc game that is Hyper Fiesta. Get yours today!
Hyper teams and hyper FFA/Solo have always been pretty popular as well, but like other variants, began to slowly die off. Hyper teams is rarely played nowadays, and its FFA counterpart is played every now and then, but mostly by the same 6-8 players.
@ChessMasterGS and @martinaxo recently introduced the 4 Player Ultrabullet Cup (4PUC), which sparked a newfound flame in players to fight in the classic 6 second, no increment game mode. This event gathered lots of attention, with GS's blog post garnering over 2000 views in the span of a month.
However, this will probably just be another spike in popularity; I doubt it'll continue to stay at this level of activity. Just as 4pc once exploded soon after its birth, with Jon Ludvig Hammer promoting the game heavily; Fog of War with Hikaru and Levy; and Duck Chess with popular content creator Eric Rosen, it's quite predictable what may happen to 4pc hyperbullet and ultrabullet—even more so, considering the 4PUC wasn't advertised by any streamers and was purely an event organized by variants players themselves.
With such a broad community comes, inevitably, some pretty funny and stupid takes on certain ideas, or just downright hilarious actions or statements made by players within games that most of the time make no sense at all, even within the context of the situation.
And, of course, sometimes the entire crowd decides to do something stupid simply because it's funny.
Brief explanation on 6v1 USA teamers: basically one day @LucianoBonfico joins a bullet game and gets 3v1d by some guys and then starts complaining about it on stream and it becomes a meme. Hard to explain if you weren't there when it happened so rip you trust me it was very very funny!
For whatever reason, in late 2019 to 2020, someone came up with the idea to close their account and make a new one. This action technically doesn't violate the Terms of Service of Chess.com, so it was perfectly legal. Unfortunately, it wasn't as fun to deal with as it was legal.
Old players were making new accounts left and right, and within a week, there were at least 20 new accounts that no one knew anything about—other than the fact that they were possibly a smurf. And this trend wasn't just popular among the intermediate and advanced players of the game. Even some of the most elite players decided to close their account and create a new one—a fresh start, per se.
By this point, it became clear that if you didn't also make a new account, your rating would be severely harmed by those who did. Unconverted players were dropping points like flies to seemingly innocent 1500? rated players...who were actually 2500+ players in disguise. The reactions of these players were hilarious! It also showed just how overrated and undeserving of a status certain players were, which I find to be a benefit of this whole...Great Awakening?
Ultimately, this uprising eventually led to multiple complaints in the forums about "alts" ruining the game. But since this whole thing was legal by Chess.com's ToS, the admins could do nothing about the situation. It was funny while it lasted.
Now, it has become a major problem. People are no longer doing the same thing, closing old accounts and making new ones. They just make new accounts, unverified as well. Finding and banning these players has become such a pain to the point where almost nothing is done about it anymore. And it's done by the most random people, too, which only adds gas to the fire. It's become one of the minor but nevertheless annoying factors leading to the decline in popularity of variants.
In late 2020, a new addition to Variants was announced: Custom Variants. Players were now able to submit their own creations to be reviewed by the new Custom Games Admin (CGA) team, and to be added as playable, rated custom variants. At the time of its introduction, the average custom variant creation process typically consisted of:
- Choosing a starting board size
- Adding squares or blocking them off with walls (bricks)
- Placing pieces on the board, ranging from the standard set to a variety of fairy pieces
- Choosing variants gamerules for the game to be played in
- Testing the variant with other people, and collecting those test games
- Creating a formal submission with those testing games
- Having the variant reviewed by the CGAs before either being accepted or declined
As time went on, Chess.com Staff member and developer @qilp, who once started as just another Variants player, made their way up the ranks and achieved the position a few years later. Congrats! qilp then programs @CGAbot, a tool used by the CGAs to make the reviewing process much simpler. CGAbot was programmed to automatically place a variant that didn't meet the requirements for submission outlined by the CGAs under the "Requirements not Met" (RNM) status, and would place a variant "Under Review" (UR) if it did meet the requirements. This would then notify the CGAs to only review variants placed in the UR status. All of this was (and still is) managed in the Official Custom Variants Club. You can browse through the pinned forums there for more information.
The CGAs themselves are usually players that have acquired more knowledge about variants gameplay and strategy than the average variants player. Notable CGAs are @qilp, @bsrti, and @BoxJellyfishChess (of course), three of whom I believe to be the strongest players when it comes to these criteria. Some of the other CGAs over the years were @TheChessDude991, @grable, and @6_K. Currently, the CGA team consists of @qilp, @bsrti, @ChessMasterGS, @NoWellOkay, and myself.
Custom Variants have evolved over time, with the addition of new gamerules and features. But along with the incorporation of those new items came a rise in expectations and standards. The theory of variants itself has improved drastically, with different forms of game classification and gameplay strategy lists.
Inevitably what ended it all was the fateful decision to move all the elements of the 4pc server over to the Variants server. On March 25th, 2022, the 4pc server was taken down for "maintenance"...but disappeared soon after.
With the merge came numerous changes, including a change in the Standard 4pc (starting) position and a completely new rating system, changing the very nature of the game—in the span of a week.
Almost immediately, people began to despise the changes. Various forums were created, mostly complaints with the changes, but some also revolved around server instability and bugs. Lots of bugs. It was ultimately the year-long war against server bugs and instability that coerced people to leave the game, bringing the activity down to around a quarter of what it once was. And when we thought all was finally said and done, the Spell Chess update came along...and basically reversed all the hard work, time, and effort that was put into fixing the servers—in one day. Bugs and bug reports started pouring out.
After the merge, the popularity of the game plateaued for a while and slowly began to "fall off". Players were constantly complaining about server disconnects during games and demanding rating refunds. Eventually, the "burden" (so to speak) because too much for certain players to handle. Due other outside commitments as well, players started leaving the game forever.
Nothing to say here.
The Variants server is making some sort of comeback, I guess. But it's really, really slow.
The Duck Revolution and the Addition of Duck Chess
About half a year after the merge, some smooth brain decided to change his pfp to a duck. Specifically, this little guy:
I don't know why, but this kicked off a new pfp revolution not only within Variants but also Chess.com as a whole. It originally started as a meme within the community of post-merge hyperbullet players, but eventually spread out so far and wide that @spacebar decided to add a completely new variant, Duck Chess, to the server. And then Eric Rosen found it. You know the story from there.
One of the other...popularity...increase-inducing? events is the Variants Chess Played Quick, in which popular streamers compete in a string of challenges to win the ultimate prize: Twitch gift subs. Very interesting.
The challenges are simple in name, but depending on the skill of your opponents, can be hard to complete in the game. Sometimes, it's as easy as moving your queen to the center of the board by move 4. Other times, you need to move your king into your teammate's territory—something that requires a bare minimum of 11-13 moves, let alone dealing with winning the game itself while doing so.
Consequently, challenges are assigned a point value based on their respective difficulty. The easier ones are worth 1 point, with slightly harder challenges worth 2, while the most difficult ones are worth 3.
Recently, we had a large number of streamers compete in the CPQ, even chess celebrities such as WFM Alexandra Botez and GM Jon Ludvig Hammer, as well as native 4pc players such as Luke Romanko (@fourplayerchess) and Vahan The Man (@Cha_ChaRealSmooth).
I guess you could say the event was a success. It wasn't all that interesting, though. That's probably what happens when you have regular 4pc players go up against newbies that don't know how the game works at all.
A few months ago, Chess.com suddenly decided to partner with Supercell. The agreement involved Chess.com promoting Supercell and vice versa. Supercell would add Chess Royale, as an outside appendage to their already very popular game, Clash Royale, and CC in return would add Spell Chess to the Variants server. One of them worked out very well, but the other...ehh, not so much.
Spell Chess was honestly not a great idea, at least in my opinion. But you gotta do what you gotta do.
The main issue with Spell Chess is that it was barely tested and released along with a server update that was also barely tested. Inevitably, this update came with a load of new bugs and glitches, basically resetting all the hard work that had been done on server stability up to this point.
But I guess it helped with popularity, obtaining over double the amount of 4pc players within a week of it being released. It's probably going to die out again, though...
The 4pc community as a whole has changed a lot over the 5+ years of the server's existence. What once used to be a game booming in popularity is now just ancient remains, yet there is still much that we all can learn about its history. There's a lot of stuff I myself don't even know about the origins of 4pc.
Heck, I still have friend groups that started 3-4 years ago. While basically no one still plays the game, we still talk to each other on a nearly-daily basis.
But it's always fun to look through the past. Lots of nostalgia, I tell you.
Anyway, that's all that there is to cover in this blog. Stay tuned, and thanks for stopping by Cheese Academy.
