Why is not Chess960 live more popular?

Of course you can't play Chess960 live here. You can play Chess960 correspondence which I did and enjoed it very much. I learned how to make a plan quickly if I see a Chess960 starting position. I would really like to play it in live but I can't. I can't play it here for the obvious reason but chess.com may know something about why not to implement this feature.

Since at an other site where I play which offers live Chess960 it is also very difficult to find a partner. The common pattern is when the opponents click on my open seek it takes for them 10 seconds to realize that something is wrong with the order of the pieces. They are very surprised ( despite the seek graph having a different symbol for Chess960 ) and quickly abort the game ( 9 out of 10 cases ).

Are they afraid or just trust their routine moves better? I simply don't understand why there is no curiosity in them to find out what they can achive in a theory free game where they have to make up their mind for themselves.

This is really not the place to advertise other sites this is why I did not mention any site name.

However if you mentioned a site I wonder - if it is not a secret - what your rating is over there ( I mean standard not tournament ) and at what time control you play. Since at certain ratings and time controls I see those triangles but somehow I can't get a game at my rating ( 1900+ ) and my time control ( 15 min ).

Because you get so familiar with various strategies involving pawn formations, different centers (such as King's Indian, c4 + e4 vs. e6 + d6, and other setups) and piece placements.  Opening rules such as development and don't make too many weakening pawn moves still apply however.  

Hello you,

Thanks, Watcha, for opening this topic...

I really LOVE too playing at 960, and amy rating is really "medium", but i have the same problem to find partners (i'm not afraid of playing with "stronger" than me, but i think this is a mix of reasons....:

When people discover it accidently , they are surprised (first time i thought about a hacker ;+), maybe afraid as you say, much more by breaking the routine (chess players were often considerred as "conservative people"), the other BIG problem is that there is not the same corpus of teachings, lessons, books and so on to learn 960 :loool:, so it's difficult for future partners to imagine them to get better...

I think exactly the opposite: 960, whatever is the level you practice, make growing the intuition, the reactivity and something we could call "instinct" (?!)

The other problem i encontered is that most "online chess" needs recent realeases of Flashplayer or Java, that i don't have cause i got an old Mac, with old OS, and Chess.com is quite the only "good quality" site where i can play online now...

I didn'treally understood the reason why they don't develop "960live" here...i'm a newbie here...

If you want to, i can send you a link to a site where you can find partners at 960 very quickly (gieve me your email, cause i dont want to make advertisement, i DO like Chess.com too :+)

After more than 10 years I want to return to chess, but not to chess openings. In the meantime I studied endgames, and for me that is what makes chess the best game on this planet.

So I am looking for chess960 too, with serious time controls like 15 minutes or more. Please, I hope that chess.com wil make live chess960 possible soon. It is ALL about chess!

Either you can hope, or you can find instead tons of open source sites with liquid variant play, including Chess960, Anti Chess, Three Check, King of the Hill, Atomic Chess.

I think the only reason this site has no 960 is because the paying members don't show much interest in it.

Yes, this is a problem with chess.com: they measure everything in profit and ignore the subtle needs of their users. This is one of the reasons I'm no longer a paying member here. Instead I'm donating to an open source site which pays attention to its users and develops new features rapidly. The donation is so open that there is counter which shows how much percent of the server fee has been donated already in a given month ( you can have a look at the bill issued by the provider if you want to ).

The hard fact is that running an operation chess.com size in terms of server fees is not more than a couple of hundred dollars per month. All other things are about profit, and while it is true that chess.com offers something for paying subsrcibers, this something is way exaggarated in terms of fees. The main thing for me is liquidity, ease of use and development. All those I get at the open source site I'm playing at now. I have no nostalgy for playing at chess.com. Even if someone else would pay for the expenses here, I would prefer my current site.

because it's a phony fake knock off of the real deal is why not to mention contrived? 

Donation counter at my new site:

This is the kind of open deal which I like. You can see, so far $432 has been donated in January.

so vague, name the site already

Anyhow, it's not going to happen for nonpaying members, 100% guaranteed, so if anyone looks for live 960, then use other sites.

I'm not advertising here other sites. This is chess.com's site, they pay for this forum, I don't.

Do your research. Google 'open source chess site'. The site I'm talking about is in the top 10 hits.