Chess960 Starting Position Index

Together, we can create the best Chess.com DB with games and analysis for each 960 Starting Positions (SP), providing us with a helpful guide for our future individual games and team matches.

We are not aiming to develop a complete Opening / Game Explorer as the ones available for Classic Chess (mainly because we would need around 3 Billion (with "B") games to do that, and unfortunately, there are just a few thousand games played by GMs in tournaments). Our main goal, should be to describe each Starting Position, with comments providing advise about Castling, Development and Weaknesses in every Starting Position.

You are welcome to contribute and populate the DB list with all your chess960 games, comments and personal analysis! Please post them into the corresponding SP thread. (if you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask!)

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TO USE THE DB INDEX CLICK ON THE SP - ID LINKS TO GO TO THE CORRESPONDING THREAD!

 

SP: these are the 960 IDs for the Random chess Starting Positions. Check for the active LINKS to got to the corresponing SP analysis threads.

SetUp: taking white position, the pieces location for each SP. It will help you to find easily the SP code (using CTRL+f and typing your pieces distribution) Besides, you can use it to create a X-FEN string:

[FEN "xxxxxxxx/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/XXXXXXXX w KQkq - 0 1"]

or the Shredder-FEN:

[FEN "xxxxxxxx/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/XXXXXXXX w AHah - 0 1"]

                                                          *Still deciding if we will post X-FEN or Shredder-FEN

Twin: Each SP has its "twin" when playing in black, that means that e.g. the relative position for white playing SP000 it is the same as playing SP959 for black.

Remarks: Any useful comments about the corresponding SP.                                                                   

Games in DB (+63,750): these are the Master, Computer and Amateur Games I have for each SP. I am in the process of gathering around 100k. (Hopefully, I will made those available to download pretty soon!)

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 Return to Chess960 RandomChess Guide.

Sorry, but I think this project is wrong in it's essence: the whole point of chess960 is NOT to study openings, NOT to give advantages to players who have the time or inclination to study positions in advance of a game. Of course you could undertake this effort, but anyone who is looking at the results would be "cheating" the game. I'd you want to study, stick to standard chess where book openings invite study -- please give up this project, to the extent you record advantages in the various starting positions, you defeat the game's purpose and give unfair advantage to players who look at your cheat sheet. I know this is hard for you to admit, but please do consider...

Thanks for your comment, I have to say that the main purpose of this project is not to provide opening theory at the level of classic chess but just a basic guide when you start a new game.

I agree with the basic essence of Chess960 you state but I believe it applies to OTB chess or maybe when you play blitz games online... (Hopefully, chess.com will have that option available soon)

When classic chess was starting in the Internet, there was more or less the same information as we have now, but only available at the hand of a few (those with enough time to study all the books and with easy access to extensive chess libraries)... internet has provided the best tool to spread the chess knowledge even onto the basic players... Chess960 is not out of that reality.

If I don't do that, others will create it for their own advantage, (in fact, there are several sites with games explorers and Openings database for Chess960 already) and nothing prevents any player to create their own and personal Chess960 Data Base.

 

I apology to those who still believed that Chess960 was out of the same "issues" experimented on classic Chess, but unfortunately it is not... and above all, we have to walk in line with the progress and the future, and the future of online /correspondence chess is the quick access to the information to have all the players under the same conditions.

Cool Project

https://www.mark-weeks.com/cfaa/chess960/c960strt.htm