Why are you guys choosing to play chess instead of Fischer Random Chess/Chess960?

@FiveofSwords said in #27:

Just learn your openings.

I know a few. But I want more interesting positions. I've been getting those more often with 960.

Because I'm still just learning the basics of regular chess :p

I once played a chess960-like variant on the club where each side could choose their own starting position. I wonder if something like that would be appliable at professional level

@LillyStrikesBack said in #32:

Because I'm still just learning the basics of regular chess :p

This is the best reason I've heard so far haha

Bobby was the best ...

I also like chess960 but the quality of the games is usually quite low.
Even strong masters blunder early often, for example Aronian-Bacrot (don't remember the tournaments name).

Usually somehow a position arises witch looks like the regular ones but with quite badly placed pieces.

I understand this is annoying for many people.

@Prophiscient said in #29:

What do you mean by "geometric adequacy" of the starting position? What would be "geometrically inadequate" about having the bishops and rook positions swapped?

I mentioned the quality of the rook to have the same reach on any square, so corners are finest for the rooks in view of group mobility.

Again, this is romanticizing the pieces. They're just pieces. You have to use them a certain way to win the game and to avoid losing the game. We don't need to go on about their symbolic value and how that value is expressed in piece placement.

Do you find it "disrespectful" if a queen starts in a corner or a king starts on b1? To me, that creates interesting new possibilities. I'm not concerned about disrespecting a piece of wood or a digital representation of a piece of wood.

"Disrespectful", the term is your suggestion. If anything it is dismissive of the meaning of the standard piece set and placement. My friend @Sacmaniac , 960-lover and a nice spokesman for the cause like you, as well, likes to see the pieces as an arsenal of different weapons. He has also designed a chess set purely out of geometrical forms. Not seeing the agency of the pieces- we play pieces that have choices of directions- means giving up on meaning.
Clinging to the meaning is not romanticizing. Dismissing it does not bring us closer to chess but farther away. But go on and pretend you are just pushing around pieces of wood or 2-d sets of them ;)

And I think that less practical (or harder to navigate) positions allow for more creativity as we have to come up with unique solutions to harmonize our pieces. This is given to us on a silver platter in the old chess. We have to think harder and come up with solutions to harmonize our pieces in some positions. Just like life.

I agree with the silver platter. Just like life. No need to reverse engineer the big bang ;)

It has pros and cons. A pro is the ability to have more unique positions and being given the opportunity to find creative ways to harmonize our pieces while preventing our opponents from being able to do so. A potential negative is that the starting position may be less aesthetically pleasing based on what we're used to. But I think the pros outweigh the cons.

Agreed, but it should not be called chess, which is that other thing. I brought up the number (518) myself, but while Chess 960 incorporates the standard position, chess will never be SP001-960. Well.. or so I hope :)

I think we ought to allow for the full geometric beauty of chess to be expressed in all of the possibilities that Fischer Random gives us instead of being trapped forever in the same starting position.

We have allowed it. Having Chess 960, we ought to play some. (I like it, for sure). No gain, only loss to try to take over chess.

This is the opening theory dilemma! If you play an unsound opening, you disadvantage yourself, and your opponent can punish you. They may know the opening, or you might give yourself a terrible position. This would only be a factor if your opponent isn't strong enough to punish you. And to play a new opening competently, you have to study the common lines. Then chess becomes more about memorization and work than skill and fun.

This is the argument for Fischer Random Chess.

People play too much to win. Or they would all play all sorts of openings and not be bored and maimed.

We'd be abandoning pointless tradition to embrace the future.

You making all the points for 960 doesn't make traditional chess pointless!

I agree with you that fragmenting isn't optimal. SP518 should be absorbed into chess960 ;)

Chess 960 is part of the chess world. It has been established as an original game. Praise it, praise it, praise it, cast no shadow on chess :)

@Prophiscient said in #3:

None of the positions you get in Chess960 are random except the starting positions.

In a sense, the starting position in regular chess is kind of random. It's not like God or the players chose it. It just developed that way according to arbitrary historical events.

The starting positions in Chess960 aren''t truely random either -- a position out of a selected subset of possible starting positions is choosen uniformly. Out of the 5040 ways to arrange the 8 pieces on the first rank, 4080 will never be selected due to following some of the same arbitrary historical events which led to the standard starting position.

I mean, come on, start every game with Bishops on different colours? And always the King between the Rooks? And always behind 8 pawns? Isn't that boring?

many of us prefer normal chess over chess960, as even though it is true that openings have been analyzed to death, most of us don't really go through the effort of learning 15 moves of theory, and even more so if we exclusively play online blitz/bullet, and levels below 2000, the opening basically has no effect on the result of the game, the better player wins most of the time.

besides if we want a different position than we are used to, just play a different opening.

@Idvan said in #36:

I also like chess960 but the quality of the games is usually quite low.
Even strong masters blunder early often, for example Aronian-Bacrot (don't remember the tournaments name).

Usually somehow a position arises witch looks like the regular ones but with quite badly placed pieces.

I understand this is annoying for many people.

I think this can be because people rely on opening theory and familiar positions rather than chess skill. As chess960 grows, people will become more familiar with odd positions and the quality of games should increase.

Perhaps the quality of games is low now because people have been relying on theory.