World Championship Fischer Random

[Hans Jung]

https://en.chessbase.com/post/world-...h-2022-preview Will Wesley So win?

[Brad Thomson]

I love FischerRandom, it is the way of the future, it takes computer preparation out of the game and adds new life to a game that gradually becomes stale and played out.

Hans, I cannot venture a guess as to the winner, but the player who plays the best will win, not the player who prepares the best.

[Hans Jung]

https://en.chessbase.com/post/world-...dom-ch-2022-d1 Magnus sacks a piece on move one against Nakamura but Nakamura declines. Abdusattorov beats Nepo by ripping open his king position in 22 moves.

[Hans Jung]

https://en.chessbase.com/post/world-...dom-ch-2022-d2 The big news is the play of Abdusattorov!

[Hans Jung]

Well it looks like Wesley So will not win this one. He made a technical blunder against Nepo when he misunderstood the castling rule and allowed a horrible finish. Its hard to recover from something like that.

[Brad Thomson]

I remember a story of Kortchnoi playing classical chess and not being sure if he could castle when his rook was under fire. He paused and went to the arbiter to make sure that he could before touching his King.

[Hans Jung]

Abdusattarov plays Nakamura and Magnus vs Nepo in the semi finals. Hopefully creative chess continues.

[Hans Jung]

In semi finals Nakamura crunches Abdusattorov 3-0 and Nepo over Magnus 3-1.

[Mario Moran-Venegas]

"I love FischerRandom, it is the way of the future, it takes computer preparation out of the game and adds new life to a game that gradually becomes stale and played out."
How naive.

There are databases of openings for each of the 960 possible initial positions.

[Brad Thomson]

"I love FischerRandom, it is the way of the future, it takes computer preparation out of the game and adds new life to a game that gradually becomes stale and played out."
How naive.

There are databases of openings for each of the 960 possible initial positions.

Perhaps, but I doubt if any of the top players could remember the openings of all 960 positions some 10-20 moves deep or more in all directions and variations, as they do with the classical position.

[Tom O'Donnell]

I don't like Fischer Random. It's not sufficiently random. I would propose modifications:

1) No castling. Teaching the rules of castling in standard chess are difficult enough.

2) Piece placement is determined by the players as part of the game. White moves first, by placing a piece down on a square, then Black, then White, etc. until all pieces are placed, then White moves first on the now completely set up board. This gives the better players more ways to get the advantage. Also, it is possible that Black could be better before White makes their first move thereby somewhat negating the natural White advantage in both Fischer Random and classical chess.

3) All piece placements are legal. Kings do not need to be between rooks. If a player wishes to have two bishops of the same colour, they can do so. "Bad" placements might be correct against certain opponents or certain setups. It would lend itself to more creativity and make it even more difficult to prepare since there would be more potential setups and most would be asymmetrical.

[Brad Thomson]

Tom, I remember you and I discussing these ideas years ago now. We joked that the players might spend a lot of their time in the placing of pieces before they even played a board move, and in extreme cases someone could flag, or resign, during the placements. :) And what we both liked was the fact that White's standard advantage is to some extent negated by the fact that it is Black who decides whether the position will by symmetrical or not. Play actually begins with only the pawns on the board, and chess calculation and thinking starts with the placements! This may be where chess ends up once the 960 FischerRandom variations are played out in about a millenium or so. Or am I being naive?

[Walter De Jong]

Have never payed any attention to Fischer Random before, but the games I watched the last few days were some of the most entertaining chess I've ever seen. Unbalanced and often chaotic positions within a few moves of the starting position. Already looking forward to watching next years world championship :)

[Pargat Perrer]

I don't like Fischer Random. It's not sufficiently random. I would propose modifications:

1) No castling. Teaching the rules of castling in standard chess are difficult enough.

2) Piece placement is determined by the players as part of the game. White moves first, by placing a piece down on a square, then Black, then White, etc. until all pieces are placed, then White moves first on the now completely set up board. This gives the better players more ways to get the advantage. Also, it is possible that Black could be better before White makes their first move thereby somewhat negating the natural White advantage in both Fischer Random and classical chess.

3) All piece placements are legal. Kings do not need to be between rooks. If a player wishes to have two bishops of the same colour, they can do so. "Bad" placements might be correct against certain opponents or certain setups. It would lend itself to more creativity and make it even more difficult to prepare since there would be more potential setups and most would be asymmetrical.

I agree with ideas (1) and (3) very strongly. But with the second idea, I think it is too likely that players just keep choosing the same setup.

How about this: there is a random determination of placement for 5 of the 8 pieces for each player. That leaves 3 squares empty and 3 pieces in hand for each player. One of these pieces in hand must be the King, and the other 2 cannot be alike, i.e. two Bishops for example.

So each player has 3 different pieces and 3 randomly-determined squares to put them on. Each player thus has 27 options, and the total setups they can possibly make (once the random part has been done) is 729. The random part would make the final number of possible setups much larger.

[Tom O'Donnell]

I agree with ideas (1) and (3) very strongly. But with the second idea, I think it is too likely that players just keep choosing the same setup.

It is possible that some players would choose a symmetrical arrangement but in such cases those players are forgoing the information advantage in the placement process, which is almost certainly very bad strategy. It's quite likely players doing this will on average do even worse as Black in this version than they would in either Fischer Random or classical chess.

If you mean that players would just place their pieces in total disregard of their opponent's placement, then that also seems like a very bad strategy.

My personal view is that games are improved when there are more bad strategies available to players.

If someone's strategy were always to place their King on a1, for example, devising counterstrategies against that would be pretty obvious.