ahh, Andras Adjoran would indeed say it the other way around:

Blacks pieces are randomly selected, and whites are placed accordingly!

For those who are uplifted by the game, I make a suggestion: that for the games that apply, categorize those wins and losses in terms of the endgames that arise; or, in the absence of that, in terms of spatial imbalances or material imbalances.

Anyways, it wuld be very intresting to see exactly how this game would effect the greatest of master. Things like, "knowing lines" wouldn't make you a great player any more. That's not to say Fischer wasn't great, because I consider him the man with the best knowledge of opening theory ever(!), yet it was him who came up with the idea! (Probably not, he may have stolen it!)

TO NASMICHAEL: I agree with your point that chess960 might bring more adults into formal rated-games chess tournaments, because they would not feel out-of-practice for having forgotten all the openings.

Also, 518 is the setup id number for the orthodox chess setup, in what is currently the most popular id system. But yes there are other systems that assign different numbers to the 960 setups. At least one of these other systems has a major advantage over the 518 system, though I am not yet at liberty to give details.

Of course, people are different and some actually enjoy the opening preparation work. There is nothing wrong with it in principle. My chess interests and chess enjoyment just comes from different aspects of the game.

<farrooj: but chess 959 has cooler logo potentiel.> You are right! Cool observation.

<PSDad> I presume you are refering to the difficulty of mapping the 0-959 numbers into starting positions in some human-friendly way.

Opening preparation has had a great deal to do with who has become World Chess Champion ever since Alekhine and even before.

Would AAA have won if he had to play Capablanca starting from a random position? Odds are no, and he may have been routed.

Botvinnik also may not have attained WC status, since his great edge was looking more deeply into the systems that had lately been invented.

While Pillsbury and Rubinstein got more mileage of the opening research than their contemporaries, it realy was Alekhine, during his drive towards the world championship, who opened the flodgates. And then came Botvinnik, with his system of total prep in all possible aspects of play, and the WC-level chess was never again the same.

<Openings have never decided the WC,> Last WC with little opening prep was Capablanca.

<If you don't want to run into deep theory, why play for example mainline Ruy Lopez?> People play the Mainline(s), because one gets the Mainline(s) when both sides are playing reasonably sound moves. In order to get out of theory, at least one player has to play something fairly weird, say 1...Nc6?! (and hope that it is not too weird). Using myself as an example: 1...Nc6 used to be my frequent defense for a couple of years. Yet it certainly was not so because I thought so highly of its merits, but because difficult defense was preferable to me to a theoretical duel. It is highly unlikely, however, that I would often play an equivalent of 1...Nc6?! in 959-chess; I do prefer to stand better in a position.

<...even Kasparov lost his title due to mistakes in the middlegame in two games, not due to Kramnik's Berlin.> The way I see it, Kramnik's Berlin was ~50% of his victory. The rest was his prep with White, tremendous skil, and a bit of luck that Kasparov was going through a rough patch of his life.

(1) I like playing position -- thus I dislike the fact that to get people out of book, one has to use moves/plans that are suspect from the positional view.

(2) I do not enjoy walkig a theoretical minefield -- thus I dislike the fact that to play a sharp opening, with or without theoretical knowledge, one walks a minefield of prepared suprises. OTB suprises, or player's own home prep suprises, do not bug me; but journal-based booby traps do. I find a very little fun in falling into one of those.

(3) I get bored seeing the same openings over and over -- but players stick to their narow opening repertoar, as there it is where the reservoar of their knowledge is.

(4) I like playing on even terms -- thus I do not enjoy it when I get my oponent in a standard opening trap; one gets a point, but it feels a cheap victory. And it feels like a waste of a potentially good game.

(5) I dislike the sudden switch of quality of play by an oponenent -- first 16 moves by Polugaevsky and the rest of the game by Joe Doe. This has lots to be desired. Often, it is soo hard to hang on for dear life against Polugaevsky, and then Joe just flounders-and-blunders it all away. That does not make for a fun game.

(6) I do not like being dictated the pace of the game -- at times, even I am in a mood for a good old blitzkrieg attack right from the opening. But I do not dare to do that as blitztrieg attacks are bound to have been studied to death.

What I do like is the high quality opening play we get to see from the best games:

(1') Strategically subtle and positionally highly refined structural and tempo work.