Best place to find Chess960 games archived

There are a half-a-dozen great YouTube channels featuring chess games from the greats - but I can find only a handful of Chess960 games on YouTube. If there a database (or video library) of the Chess960 World Championship matches - or of GREAT players playing Chess960?

I've seen a few videos of Nakamura's matches in 2009 - but hardly anything else. I'd be interested to learn more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INs7IkjeQhE - check this out, if you haven't.

Other than that, I honestly couldn't tell you where to look, but keep Googling and I'm sure you'll find something.

Ebinola - thanks for the note here. Indeed that's the ONE video I found. Long - with some good analysis - but it's one of the very few good ones out there.

Is there a place where one can see all the Chess960 games played by users on Chess.com? It would be neat to find grandmaster level players and replay their Chess960 games move by move, but I'm not sure how to find this on Chess.com.

Thanks!

You can always check out that other chess website and use its 960 analysis board for opening book and games that have played the same moves.

You will find it difficult finding a good single resource and I think that that may not be the best approach.

First you need a list of all the starting positions, from here at the foot of the page.

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

You can open that in a spreadsheet or database and you can change the data so that you have 8 columns with a piece in each column, you can then filter the data using the columns.

You can then do things like show me all the starting positions where all the Bishops start the game standing on a corner square, you will find 60 starting positions for that.

That is the first step, you break it down into Groups of starting positions.

The next thing you need is a chess engine that has Chess960.

You decide what group of openings you want to study, pick one position, plug it in, hit go and you watch the machines play: Machine vs. Machine.

You will soon figure out what the machines are trying to do, like...

Piece activity above all else.

Restrict piece activity of the opponent.

Central control (does not require central occupation)

Rooks encourage Pawn advances

Tempo, get things done as quickly as possible, use fewest moves even if it looks artificial.

Linger for as long as possible, meaning leave your Units, mainly Bishops and Queens on their starting squares for as long as possible, the engines move Pawns a lot in the early opening and they hardly move the pieces.

This is a good online engine but will always be slower/weaker than an engine running on your machine because it uses JavaScript, the "proper" engine on your machine will probably be written in C++.

https://lichess.org/analysis

Next find games by strong players, do not bother looking for "The Chess960 Database" online, you will probably not find it.

Here is a recent tournament played on this website, it was won by GM MVL.

I think that you can somehow open a page that will show ALL games played in this tournament, find out how to do that, I could not care less.

Watch what the grandmasters are doing, they are doing exactly the same thing as the chess engines, cheeky buggers, the grandmasters are doing exactly that, they watch Machine vs. Machine games because no humans know how to play Chess960, because no theory exists.

https://www.chess.com/news/view/smooth-operator-mvl-wins-chess960-championship

Look at the first game in the above link.

White plays b3 and a4 because to an engine a Queen is Rook + Bishop.

b3 restricts the Bishop on h8 and controls d4 and e5.

a4 because Rooks encourage Pawn advances, a Queen is part Rook, white is making space for piece activity.

Black plays b5, looks odd with the King so close, but Rooks encourage Pawn advances, you will see this a LOT in Chess960.

Chess960 is not treated seriously by the grandmasters.

I have sat and discussed Chess960 with a grandmaster at length on a number of occasions.

He absolutely refuses to play it, why did MVL play in this tournament? Because it was easy money for him and that is what being a PRO is all about.

The point is that you are not trying to learn opening theory, you are trying to play like a machine during the early opening, that is what the grandmasters are doing.

Then you play like a human once you are out of "machine book"