FreeStyle Chess
I am very excited. Vincent seems to be the best
11 Replies
Couldn't be less interested in this chess variant that is only designed because Magnus doesn't want to play classical chess anymore because risking his title would be too financially damaging. The story that chess is dead has been around since the 60s.
+1
I think Bobby was right. This is the future of chess. Separates the chess players from the Stockfish prep kiddies.
Levy Rozman has pointed out in this format you can lose in 8 moves.
Couldn't be less interested in this chess variant that is only designed because Magnus doesn't want to play classical chess anymore because risking his title would be too financially damaging. The story that chess is dead has been around since the 60s.
you mean 1400s?
Couldn't be less interested in this chess variant that is only designed because Magnus doesn't want to play classical chess anymore because risking his title would be too financially damaging. The story that chess is dead has been around since the 60s.
In the 1930's (maybe even earlier), Capablanca thought was the chess technique was advancing at such a rapid pace that regular chess would be played out in the near future.
It is really sad that Placement Chess is not more well known. It gives 5 million possible starting positions vs. 960 random. Fischer Random has a few flaws: many positions it gives are heavily favored for white (if not outright winning) and also arguably the element of randomization runs counter to the whole idea of chess as a game of complete information. The irony of history here as well is that Placement Chess (as promoted by Benko and Bronstein) was the inspiration for Bobby to "fix" chess.
A favorite complaint and soapbox of mine to be sure, alas it has fallen on deaf ears in the chess community.
Peak rating 2350FIDE, USCF 2400.
I'd rather the elite play randomly selected openings (since they're essentially all universal type chess players at this point) than freestyle.
Checkers plays that way. You draw 2- or 3-move openings in most high-level formats.
But Checkers and Chess are trying to solve different problems, even if they both do derive from prep.
With Checkers, the problem with opening prep is that players could provably force every game into a drawn line without that rule in place.
So they let you draw from every *possible* board state after three moves that don't force an unequal capture.
You couldn't really do that in chess. Even if you exclude the lines with hung pieces or even hung mate, you'd end up with a lot of positions that are just grossly unequal.
