There are NOT any Books on FRC Opening.............

[Chessqueen]

The principles of opening play remain the same, regardless of how the pieces are shuffled.

Any book on opening strategy will be useful...because they'll say "develop your pieces, control the center, protect your king".

The point of FRC is that there IS no memorizable theory...if you want an "opening repertoire" for FRC, just stick to classical chess.

The same principies NOT always works when the pieces shuffled, the strategies for space, development, material, and center control will always vary from position to position, if that was the case GM Carlsen would not had performed that poor against GM SO. Another case that I can point out is when GM Caruana won the first game against Carlsen after they interviewed him he mentioned "I simply developed my pieces and control the center"; but after other FRC positions came out those strategies did NOT worked so well for Caruana for the rest of his FRC games.

[BrendanJNorman]

...the strategies for space, development, material, and center control will always vary from position to position.

As IS the case in Classical chess.

In the hedgehog structures for example, space means less because of the "coiled spring" nature of the setup.

Similar variance of strategies (or "weights" might be a more apt description in a computer chess forum) appear in the French Defense, King's Indian and many others.

Or the variance of the importance of the material and development "weights" in gambit openings come to mind.

The difference in FRC is that years of experience and mastery of certain STRUCTURES (which is where a lot of pattern recognition can be used...at least in a strategic sense) is thrown out the window and the importance of creativity is increased tenfold.

One must figure out how to apply old ideas to a completely new setting.

Classical players, even as strong as Carlsen suffer here, while creative players like So and I guess Mamedyarov, rise above others.

I have seen examples of this in real life FRC tournaments...

One friend of mine is barely 2100, but a creative genius (not only in chess) and in the post classical tournament FRC tournament, he was crushing 2480 Elo IMs and crushed a GM, and finished very highly in the standings.

I imagine from the old school, guys like Botvinnik would struggle against the likes of Tal, Nezhmetdinov or Geller too.

[jp]

One friend of mine is barely 2100, but a creative genius (not only in chess) and in the post classical tournament FRC tournament, he was crushing 2480 Elo IMs and crushed a GM, and finished very highly in the standings.

Can you show us some of these games? It might be very interesting to see where the GM/IMs went wrong.

Classical players, even as strong as Carlsen suffer here, while creative players like So rise above others.

It's premature to conclude this about So... He lost a match at the start of qualifying, but the structure allowed a second chance. I think losing and playing so much got him invaluable practice, so by the time the finals came round he'd had the best preparation.

[BrendanJNorman]

One friend of mine is barely 2100, but a creative genius (not only in chess) and in the post classical tournament FRC tournament, he was crushing 2480 Elo IMs and crushed a GM, and finished very highly in the standings.

Can you show us some of these games? It might be very interesting to see where the GM/IMs went wrong.

Sorry, no. I'm speaking of a FRC event from more than ten years ago...before it was 'cool' so to speak.

And nobody recorded the games...

Classical players, even as strong as Carlsen suffer here, while creative players like So rise above others.

It's premature to conclude this about So... He lost a match at the start of qualifying, but the structure allowed a second chance. I think losing and playing so much got him invaluable practice, so by the time the finals came round he'd had the best preparation.

I didn't make my conclusion based on the recent event...I didn't even follow it actually...

I made my conclusions based on the knowledge that Wesley was already a creative and highly tactical GM as a teenager and long before he moved to the U.S.

Back when he a talented Philipino boy playing on ICC, chatting to a buddy of mine and smashing GMs in blitz.

Back when he was preparing all of his openings with Fritz and testing them in the ICC 5- pool.

I miss those days actually.

Point is, chessplayers who already have a gift for tactics and creative ideas have a large advantage in FRC, and in variants like Bughouse as well - a game in which Lev Aronian is very good.