Chess Variant (Shuffle Chess)

Anybody interested in Chess Variants?

I have recently started playing a lot of chess960, which is a variant of chess, created by the former World Champion Bobby Fischer. Fischer's goal was to create a chess variant in which chess creativity and talent would be more important than memorization and analysis of opening moves. His approach was to create a randomized initial chess position, which would thus make memorizing chess opening move sequences useless. The initial position is set up in a special way and there are 960 such positions, thus the name 'Chess960'. This is a great contrast to orthodox chess, which only has 1 set up position, and is now usually referred to as chess1. Since the opening book for each possible opening position would be too difficult to devote to memory, each player must create every move originally. From the first move, both players have to come up with original strategies and cannot use well-known thinking patterns. Chess960 thus becomes a game more of tactics, strategy, and creativity rather than just memorisation.

I recently joined the site www.mychess.de which lets you play chess960 against other people on the internet. The starting positions can be automatically set up by mychess.de or you can choose a number out of 960 and the set up will be created by mychess.de. Once you make a move, an email is sent to your opponent to tell him or her it's their turn, and vice versa. You can also play live over the internet, join tournaments or create your own. It' a great site and I recommend it to people who are interested in chess960. However you can also play chess1 or orthodox chess on the site too, and is a great site for that also.

I hope one day they'll  be a shuffle chess variation that hopefully gets out of tradition and invents a better, more logical way of castling then chess960 has. I've invented my own actually: One player mixes his minor and major pieces together, along with his King, then without looking picks up a piece and sets it on the back rank of the first square starting from the left. This continues until all pieces and the King are in their positions. The only rule, like chess960, is that the Bishops have to be on opposite colours. However unlike chess960 the King does not have to be between the two rooks. So you can have a setup of a King on the H1 square and the two rooks to the left of the King. The King still has the power to castle with both rooks, and all the same castling rules apply. However, unlike the strange castling in chess960, in which wherever the rook and King is, the final resting positions after castling results to the position of how chess1 or orthodox chess castling position is; with my way, the King just moves two places to the right or left and the rook goes on the other side of the King. If the King can not move over two spaces, because of being to close to the edge of the board, then it just replaces the rook's position, the King thus only moving one position over. If when setting up the pieces and you lay a bishop down on the same colour as an already laid Bishop, just move the Bishop to the next square to the right, making it thus on a different colour. If the last piece you lay happens to be a Bishop and the last square would make the Bishops on the same colour, then just take the second to the last piece you put down and switch it with the Bishop. The ponds are set up like in chess1 and the other player sets up his pieces so that black and white have a symmetrical position, like chess960, which insures that there is no start up set advantages. This chess variation creates even more random set positions then chess 960, making it even more interesting and with more possibilities in the opening, and throughout the whole game.