St. Louis chess960/FRC

[lkaufman]

So the 10 super-GM round robin chess960 (FRC) tournament in St. Louis has concluded with 32 out of 45 games decisive, only 13 draws (29%). Even if you exclude the results of Kasparov, who shockingly managed only to get a single draw, we have 24 out of 36 games decisive, only 33% drawn. In the playoff for first place, all 3 games (including the Armageddon) were also decisive. Even with the drawn games, it looked like someone was winning or at least close to winning at some stage in the majority of games according to the engines. The players comments afterward were mostly favorable, ranging from "it's a nice option for variety" to "I wish this was the norm" (not actual quotes, just my paraphrasing of their comments). They often commented on how often one side would be in big trouble after just a few moves, sometimes even the White side! With the World Championship of FRC coming up soon in Iceland, it looks like it will continue to grow in popularity and importance. It is so interesting to see games start with positions that are not already known to be 90% likely drawn when the players exit book.
I think this justifies a little more attention to FRC in computer chess (or to offshoots like "chess324" to reduce the draws that are still a big problem with top engines at long time controls on good hardware). I know we already do have one rating list for it and occasional tournaments, I'm just hoping to see more of that. As for engine vs human competition, I hope we can have some knight odds FRC matches with GMs soon, the main questions being how strong the GMs should be and what the time limit should be. With the right time limit and right human elo, these should be quite competitive and interesting.

[Chessqueen]

So the 10 super-GM round robin chess960 (FRC) tournament in St. Louis has concluded with 32 out of 45 games decisive, only 13 draws (29%). Even if you exclude the results of Kasparov, who shockingly managed only to get a single draw, we have 24 out of 36 games decisive, only 33% drawn. In the playoff for first place, all 3 games (including the Armageddon) were also decisive. Even with the drawn games, it looked like someone was winning or at least close to winning at some stage in the majority of games according to the engines. The players comments afterward were mostly favorable, ranging from "it's a nice option for variety" to "I wish this was the norm" (not actual quotes, just my paraphrasing of their comments). They often commented on how often one side would be in big trouble after just a few moves, sometimes even the White side! With the World Championship of FRC coming up soon in Iceland, it looks like it will continue to grow in popularity and importance. It is so interesting to see games start with positions that are not already known to be 90% likely drawn when the players exit book.
I think this justifies a little more attention to FRC in computer chess (or to offshoots like "chess324" to reduce the draws that are still a big problem with top engines at long time controls on good hardware). I know we already do have one rating list for it and occasional tournaments, I'm just hoping to see more of that. As for engine vs human competition, I hope we can have some knight odds FRC matches with GMs soon, the main questions being how strong the GMs should be and what the time limit should be. With the right time limit and right human elo, these should be quite competitive and interesting.

I believe that with knight Odds a good challenge for Dragon would be any human around 2675 at T/C 30 minutes with 10 seconds increment

[Modern Times]

Chess960 is brilliant. When the players cannot rely on standard openings and their intensive study and preparation of them, it makes for very interesting and less drawsish games. They have to spend time thinking right from the first move. Only downside to me is the odd castling rules, but even those can make things interesting, Unlike standard chess, move 1 can be a castling move.

[lkaufman]

Chess960 is brilliant. When the players cannot rely on standard openings and their intensive study and preparation of them, it makes for very interesting and less drawsish games. They have to spend time thinking right from the first move. Only downside to me is the odd castling rules, but even those can make things interesting, Unlike standard chess, move 1 can be a castling move.

Of course the odd castling rules can be circumvented by "chess18" (which is just the 18 positions of 960 with the kings and rooks on their normal squares) or "chess324" (same as chess18 but no symmetry requirement). The problem with chess 18 is that 18 positions (including the standard one) is too small a number; top players could memorize significant theory on 18 positions. The problem with chess 324 is that some of the positions are too favorable, even winning, for one side, which is okay for engines if they play pairs of games, but humans won't like that. For human play, one could prune the 324 positions down to perhaps 200 or so, pruning the most lopsided ones. For engine vs human competition, I think the best solution is to stick with chess 18 with (white) knight odds, so 36 positions, or just 18 if we define some simple rule to choose the knight to remove. This way the humans won't be disadvantaged by unfamiliarity with the castling rules of 960. This is what we did vs. Alex Lenderman a couple years ago, but I selected the positions; for future matches they should be chosen at random from the list or even all 18 (or 17 without the normal one) could be used in a match with a short time limit. This would of course favor the humans somewhat as compared to what we did in the Lenderman match. Perhaps there are other good ideas for improving on the basic concept of chess960.

[Albert Silver]

Chess960 is brilliant. When the players cannot rely on standard openings and their intensive study and preparation of them, it makes for very interesting and less drawsish games. They have to spend time thinking right from the first move. Only downside to me is the odd castling rules, but even those can make things interesting, Unlike standard chess, move 1 can be a castling move.

Perhaps there are other good ideas for improving on the basic concept of chess960.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/double-sh ... itz-online

[Chessqueen]

Chess960 is brilliant. When the players cannot rely on standard openings and their intensive study and preparation of them, it makes for very interesting and less drawsish games. They have to spend time thinking right from the first move. Only downside to me is the odd castling rules, but even those can make things interesting, Unlike standard chess, move 1 can be a castling move.

Perhaps there are other good ideas for improving on the basic concept of chess960.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/double-sh ... itz-online

Have you read about Chess324 which Mr. Kaufman created?
There has been some discussion about how to improve chess960 (Fischerandom Chess) to address the fact that when top engines play against each other on good hardware at Rapid or slower time controls almost all the games end in draws, just as in normal chess (without forced unbalanced openings). Scrapping the symmetry requirement leads to some positions where one side is quite clearly winning.
I believe I have found a solution that is aesthetically pleasing, doesn't require special castling rules, and will dramatically lower draw percentages without any clearly won positions. I call it "Chess324". All rules are the same as in normal chess, including castling, only the start position is modified. The kings and rooks are placed on their normal positions. All the other pieces for White and Black are placed randomly, with no symmetry requirement, with the only restriction being that for each side the bishops must be on opposite colored squares. Unless I have miscalculated, there are 18 permutations for each side, making 324 total possible positions (including 18 symmetrical ones that are legal in chess960 of which 1 is the normal start position of chess).
In order to determine whether these positions are playable, I checked out the most promising-looking ones for White by checking whether White's advantage ever exceeds Black's advantage in normal chess after the Grob (1g4?) is played. There has been much discussion in the past over whether the Grob is losing or not, and I doubt that anyone really knows the answer; the Hiarcs database has Black winning 49% of the games, Lc0 gives Black 54% winning chance, and Stockfish and Dragon give evals suggesting that it is more likely to be a win than a draw but is very near the line. I checked all the promising positions I could think of with recent versions of Stockfish, Dragon, and Lc0, and in no case did I find one that produced an advantage larger than Black gets with the Grob (one position was tied per Lc0 but less per SF and Dragon). Of course the evals are all over the place, sometimes even Black is better, sometimes it's about even but not "balanced", sometimes one side is much better, but never clearly winning (at least not as clearly winning as the Grob as far as I was able to tell). Since many evals clearly favor one side, chess324 should be played in pairs of games, each side having White from the same position once. With humans, that's not essential, just recommended; with engines it would be necessary.
This version has huge advantages over chess960. First, no special castling rules, any engine or GUI or human can play with no instruction after seeing the initial position. Second, since all but 18 of the 324 positions are asymmetrical, opening play should be much more interesting and complex. Third, the normal positioning of the rooks and kings and normal castling makes the game feel closer to normal chess. Fourth, matches of up to 648 games can be played with no repeat positions, generally enough for most purposes. Most important, no matter how many cores or how much time the engines get, there should be plenty of decisive games for the foreseeable future since many positions are at least not too far from the win/draw line. The stronger engine will score 1.5 out of 2 in many of these positions for many years to come, unless chess is truly solved some day.
It is quite possible that a few of the initial positions may ultimately be judged to be won for White, but I am confident that even if they are "won", they will be near enough to the draw line to be playable with any current hardware or engines.
Komodo rules!
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[Modern Times]

Have you read about Chess324 which Mr. Kaufman created?
There has been some discussion about how to improve chess960 (Fischerandom Chess) to address the fact that when top engines play against each other on good hardware at Rapid or slower time controls almost all the games end in draws, just as in normal chess (without forced unbalanced openings).

With human chess games, the draw percentage for Chess960 is very low. So there is no real need for improvement, provided you are comfortable with the castling rules, which the people who play it clearly are.

[lkaufman]

Have you read about Chess324 which Mr. Kaufman created?
There has been some discussion about how to improve chess960 (Fischerandom Chess) to address the fact that when top engines play against each other on good hardware at Rapid or slower time controls almost all the games end in draws, just as in normal chess (without forced unbalanced openings).

With human chess games, the draw percentage for Chess960 is very low. So there is no real need for improvement, provided you are comfortable with the castling rules, which the people who play it clearly are.

Yes, chess960 is fine for OTB or online (unassisted) human play, but it doesn't work for correspondence play between humans (who are using engines); the draw percentage would probably be in the high 90s among players using good hardware and top engines. Chess324 is designed for engine vs engine play or for human correspondence play where engine use is allowed. It would be nice if one variant worked well for both unassisted human play and for engine-assisted human play, but perhaps that's asking too much.

[j.t.]

provided you are comfortable with the castling rules, which the people who play it clearly are.

Sure?

[lkaufman]

provided you are comfortable with the castling rules, which the people who play it clearly are.

Sure?

"Comfortable" may not be the right word here. The players accept the rule, but clearly they sometimes forget that castling is still legal in some positions, and sometimes the game is essentially decided because of that. I haven't heard any of them calling for a change or for playing "shuffle chess" which is basically FRC without castling (and no requirement for king to be between the rooks). They just haven't played enough FRC to be truly "comfortable" with the castling rules. In one game White castled long resulting in his rook on d1 attacking the enemy queen on d8, which could never happen in normal chess. As to whether it would be better just to play shuffle chess, without any castling (or perhaps only when it would be legal under normal chess rules), I don't have much preference, but since FRC/960 is already somewhat "standard" I'd stick with it.