For white with the pawns can move either one square or two which is 16 possibilities. The knights can move a3 or c3; that's 4 more possible moves. So white has a possible 20 moves in the opening. That means black has 20 possible moves. That's 40 possible moves between the 2 sides. You have to have pawn moves in the opening. Knights can go over pieces. If you don't have pawn moves. You can't get your bishops, queens, or king into play of the game not to mention it doesn't do much for development. I guess there won't be any chekmates if the pawns don;t get moved. Pawns the power of chess. who figures.
Proposition of how to improve chess960
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Hello,
I have an idea about how to realize Fischer's idea of chess variant in - I think - a better way. Those of you who want to get down to business may omit the introduction.
INTRODUCTION
As is well known, the point of chess960 is to change chess in such a way that players no longer have to focus on memorization and opening theory. But the important drawback of this variant is that it is unpleasant for eye. Most initial positions look like a mess, and since it makes games less enjoyable for spectators, people aren't really that interested. So a good variant would have the virtue of chess960 (getting rid of all the memorization stuff), while maintaining visual attraction for a viewer.
Thinking about this I came to three ideas of how the initial position could be changed while not making it looking like a mess.
First idea is that the pieces arrangement should be symmetrical. An example:
There are 24 possible arrangements when counting king and queen together, and 24*2 = 48 with possible king and queen switch. However, if you want to keep king between the rooks so that castling is possible, only 24 positions remain.
I think that even 48 possible starting possitions is enough for some opening theory to start growing. Surely there would be some who would study different opening positions, and other probably should do the same if they wanted keep pace.
Second idea is that at least five pieces stay on the squares they are in the opening position of classical chess. I checked it, and if only 4 pieces are on the same squares, the position may still look too messy, but if 5 pieces do, you get the kind of familiarity. Example:
However, even with 5 pieces on the initial squares it still can look too oddly, and also there are only few dozens of such positions, so again we can expect some opening theory growing.
THE END OF INTRODUCTION
The third and I think best idea derives the sense of familiarity for the eye from the condition that king and queen stay on the initial squares. Other pieces may be arranged in any way with two conditions: rooks are on both sides of the king (castling is possible in the same way as in chess960) and bishops are of opposite colors. Personally I don't consider the second necessity, but people are so accustomed to opposite-colour bishops that let's keep this.
That gives us 32 starting positions. Seems little enough for the opening theory to grow, but here's the key idea: white's and black's positions don't have to mirror each other.
The thing is that in other variants if black's and white's positions don't mirror each other, one side can have a huge advantage - like +1.00 (checked with computer). However, I checked with computer some positions in which the king and queen stay on initial squares and positions don't mirror each other, and evaluations varied from slight advantage for white to slight advantage for black, which is similar to what we have in the starting position in classical chess. And even if in some positions one side had bigger advantage, this could be overcome by the condition that players play each other twice from the same position - each one has white pieces once. Or such positions could be simply removed from the database of positions. But in positions I checked the evalutaion was acceptable.
With that condition we have 1024 starting positions. Here are two examples:
What's important, while 1024 starting positions would make learning opening theory virtually impossible, players could still learn about some ideas, which stems from the fact that each side can have only 32 arrangements and some of them resemble the others (for example, if you switch positions of one rook and one bishop).
SUMMARY
I'm not saying that people should switch over from classical chess to this variant. I also don't agree with Fischer that chess has been played out. I think there still is lot to be played, even at the highest level, as tournaments results show.
However, if one thinks about inventing chess variant with Fischer's idea - decreasing the importance of memorization and opening theory, I wanted to provide some analyses. Of course the variant I proposed isn't perfect. The sense of familiarity with positions isn't total, but you can't get that if you want to change the position. One may also dislike the idea of black's and white's position differing from each other. However, one can't get better than the compromise solution. After having thought about what gives us the sense of familiarity with the position (condition that chess960 doesn't fulfil) and how to balance two factors - large number of possible starting positions and that they shouldn't look messy to us, I can’t think of a better solution.