No Castling Chess
Hi this is Verne9 back again with another blog this time on No Castling Chess.
Most of you probably did not know that Vladimir Kramnik was the first person to suggest it saying that we need a bigger challenge in chess.
"For chess to flourish we need a new challenge"
Kramnik decided to take action and do something about what he saw. In his own words here is what he did.
"So I started thinking, if the outcome is always the same, perhaps there’s something we can do to reinvigorate the game. I spoke with Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of the artificial intelligence lab DeepMind. Hassabis was once one of the strongest junior chess players in the United Kingdom and is still a devoted chess aficionado. I was granted an opportunity to test my theory with the famous machine-learning chess engine AlphaZero
Working with DeepMind researchers Ulrich Paquet and Nenad Tomasev, we used AlphaZero as a petri dish to test different variations and see how the game might unfold. Ultimately, our mission was to find an adjustment to the rules to allow more space for human creativity."
To sum up that loooooong quote, Kramnik worked with different researchers and robots to find a way to change the rules for more creativity. He wanted the variant to be full of spice and attack yet at the same time be not too far away from chess.
Out of that came a new chess variant No Castling Chess. The name says it all, you can't castle and that is all.
rokirovka = the Russian for castling So we could call this No Rokirovka
Most of the time if you don't castle you are probably going to lose the game. So it can even be used as odds against lower rated players. Here is a quick game where that happened between Mir Sultan Khan the Indian chess wizard and Hermanis Karlovitch Mattison.
Recently though Anand and Kramnik played a chess match which Anand won proving that the inventor is not always the best at it. Here are the 4 games.
This is not even a new idea. Before this Bobby Fischer invented Fischer Random Chess. Right now Wesley So is the World Chess Champion of. The bad thing about Fischer Random Chess is all players including world class players find it hard to master until they are good at all positions. On the other hand with No-Castling Chess there is one one position and that one position you can master more fully than variants like Fischer Random Chess. Also When Stockfish played itself in this variant it was fairly similar to real chess in the results. Here are two of the games annotated by Kramnik himself.
This variant is not completely perfected so far but it has had an extremely good entrance into the wonderful world of chess. Vladimir Kramnik himself. Here he talks about that.
"There are still many details to investigate. For example, the openings seem to be more complicated in the AlphaZero no-castling games, meaning that new opening theory has to be developed and players will need to explore new approaches to king safety. But none of this should prevent the chess community from trying this game."
If you don't know how to find it here are some descriptions.
1. First click on this link which will take you to chess.com/variants.
2. Than click on the tab which says Common
3.Than scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list of variants.
4. Than click where it says No Castling that will take you here.
I hope that this should give you a good reason for if you have never played play it again, but if you have played it before try to play it more.
Thanks for reading this and goodbye until next time,
@Verne9
P.S. Here is more information on Kramnik and No Castling Chess.
No Castling Chess:
An awesome Kramnik article on this
Kramnik:
