Casablanca Chess: What historical position would you feature?

This upcoming weekend we'll have a rather unique event: Casablanca Chess.

Featuring a double round-robin format with a 15+10 Rapid time control, you'd guess it could end there, but there's a twist: All starting positions are handpicked from historical games.

To add "some cherries" to the cake, players are none other than Carlsen, Anand, Nakamura and Egypt’s number-one GM Bassem Amin, which was also a hyper PCL carry during earlier days.

If you could pick one historical position to be played, what would it be?

Share in the comments below!

Wow! That is really cool!

Probably the Nimzo-Indian with 4. Qc2. Capablanca typically played in this style and I creates some very instructive positional games. Would be nice to see in a rapid format with some of the best players at this time.

move 2 of carlsen - dominguez perez, 2019 st louis blitz round 7

I thought this was Capablanca chess 😆 Which is a chess variant on a 10x8 board hahahaha

Is it a tactic? If so, White would probably already start the game winning then!

That's definitely one I'd also love to see them play.

I've googled "nimzo indian 4.Qc2" and surprisingly the 1st result was this thread from 2010.

Still can't believe that game actually happened! 😂

Any Fantasy pieces?

Today chat picked Karpov vs Kasparov, Moscow 1985.

Someone in chat said it was a Scheveningen but I'm not entirely sure, the knight is still at g8 and Black has e5 and Be6.

3 more rounds tomorrow so we'll get a chance at picking yet another position.

Thought it was a Najdorf too! 1st thing that caught my eye was the a6-b7 pawn setup.

Yoo that's get wind.

Took me a while to find it, was the 14th Round of the 1985 WCC in Moscow. The opening was the Sicilian Defense: Paulsen, Normal Variation (B45):

They'll be different ones I believe!

Good question actually!

I guess the main idea here would be that all positions are judged equal in eval.

Yeah, it has two fairy pieces: Chancellor (rook-knight hybrid) and Archbishop (bishop-knight hybrid). Chess.com actually features a version of Capablanca chess, called Gothic Chess.

I find this position interesting, with white having a strong pawn on c7, but black has an extra pawn. I think this position would be a great position to play in the tournament.

You're not alone in thinking that! In fact, Naka said during a live interview that aside from one particular position which was kinda drawish, all other positions felt like they were a bit better for this or that side. The play potential was still there though and it allowed for some exciting games.

On Round 6 when players were voting for 1 out of 3 positions, Magnus said "I don't like any of them" 😂 which in the end was nice because they got to play it more "on the fly" without recognizing it.

The event has concluded yesterday but you can find the games here. What I thought was quite nice too is that beside the games from every round there is also a relay with the position and players involved in the original games.

It was an amazing and unique format, definitely rooting for more of these.

Oh that's awesome! Those pieces mixed in with Knight are super strong right? I remember also seeing one which was Queen+Knight hybrid, now that's scary...

Super spicy! Agree it'd be great to watch how top players would unfold it.