Chess960 questions, questions about Casual/Rated play, and feedback

Hello. Ever since my PC died forever in 2022, I developed an interest in Fairy Chess OTB, but not really sane and reasonable Chess. Once I discovered that Lichess has rated Chess960 games and Fairy Stockfish, and now that I have a mouse for my phone so I don't misclick on the board trying to play all the time, once I have more time to kill, I'm going to be practicing against Fairy Stockfish Level 3 quite a bit, perhaps even 4, until I feel like I'm finally ready to start playing games again human opponents.

After googling around for some of the questions, apparently you only have 20 seconds to make your opening move in rated play, so I'm just going to start have to go off my gut when practicing instead of study the board for while trying to figure out what to do for like 5-10 minutes before I start the timeclock, which is normally what I do when I play Chess960 OTB. The questions I couldn't find on Google are as follows.

When playing a rated game, do you get no material value counter whatsover? Because that was the suggestion I had, because the way Lichess handles the material advantage counter puzzles me, when it just suddenly says Queen+some big number, and because this is such a feature rich site, I had two suggestions for options on how to improve the material advantage counter.

1) Show exactly what pieces have been captured and nothing else, as if it was OTB game.
2) Show the Material Value what we have on the board as Bobby Fischer would approximate it it in his head, aside from the infinity.

Because I'm a numbers guy, I would probably go with #2 as my setting, but even option #1 would help me immediately size up what my status is. This would seriously help me improve my practice against the bot.

I was also wondering if you get this material value counter in a rated game at all, or I actually have to stop and count the pieces to figure that out? I really don't want to start playing humans in rated games until I stop making serious mistakes and can win against level 3 consistently without doing any takebacks at all.

Because I'm also almost 40, I need to play with a way more generous time control than what's avaiilable on the Lichess rated quickmatches in order to beat Level 3, but as my skills improve, I'm going to continue to decrease it as a I transition from playing OTB to online. When I play OTB, I normally play 20:00|15, but apparently people online play way faster than that. I don't think I'm ever gonna be able to play Bullet, though I'd probably love if I was in my 20s.

The final question I had is that apparently the only difference between the skill level of Level 3 and Level 4 is has the same level of skill, but just takes more time considering its move, is that true? Because the way I got good at Quake and Starcraft and League of Legends was by getting destroyed over and over until I finally got good, I might just skip to level 4 if this is true, and use takebacks more often when I make serious mistakes where I just straight up hung a piece.

The other suggestion I had for this site is to add Gothic Chess to the lineup of variants, because I just think that variant is super cool with the Archbishop and Chancellor, which I do know how to utilize pretty well from playing so many Fairy Chess variants OTB, and would be playing that one as well, and I used to have Fairy Stockfish on my PC, which I could play Gothic and a bunch of other variants against it by seriously kneecapping its strength.

Thank you for your time in helping a new player to online chess out and I hope you take my ideas into consideration.

RE: 960, I just wrote a post about fixing the first-move move issue:
lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/a-better-solution-for-abortion

The way the abort timer works has never been suited to 960 and people have posted about it before. Hopefully the more people play 960 and complain about it, the more attention will be given to finding a solution.

I get the impression they want to retain consistency across the site so they don't like having different behaviors for different variants, which is why I proposed a solution that could work everywhere.

RE: Other variants: lichess implemented these a long time ago and hasn't added any new ones. I think for good reason they don't want to become a variant site as that gets very cluttered very quickly. However, lichess is open source and there is a fork:

www.pychess.org/

where you can play all kinds of variants including Gothic Chess. You can even authenticate with your lichess account and use the same screen name.

I personally prefer Seirawan chess, which is the same as Gothic/Capablanca chess but uses a standard 8x8 board.

Yes, I've played Seirawan Chess before, I just don't like it as much, and what I do is I use the margins of my board as the additional 10x8 and created my own custom pieces out of superglue by taking a Knight and giving it a nice Bishop hat and taking an upsidedown Rook and giving it a Knight for a head. I even contacted the manufacturer of the pieces with photos to give an idea for a niche product they could sell as these pieces have no standard form and it's pretty easy to understand how they work from just looking at them, but they said they couldn't take unsolicited product ideas.

I read on Google several threads about the abort timer from years ago, so I guess Lichess declined to take action, so I realized I need to adjust my training and just be like hmm, this move looks good, and when I'm reviewing what I did right and wrong on the Analysis Board, I'm noticing a lot of the times my gut reaction might not be the best opening move, but it's a decent one. But in a casual bot game the timer doesn't start at all until whatever army you are controlling makes the first move, which actually caught me off guard when I was playing Black and the timer didn't start ticking. I thought it was an intended feature at first until I started Googling around about it to figure out how rated play was going to work.

Thank you for showing me about Pychess, I really want to get into alternate variants because my problem with Vanilla Chess is that I bought FCO, the Book chess.com recommends for beginners as how to study all the book openings, mostly because I'm terrible at playing Black, I tried to read it twice and I wanted to literally and figuratively throw it out the window when I was done attempting to read it, the entire book was just bouncing off of me for some reason, but the other thing that I've realized, is that I don't know why this is, but if I just play Black upsidedown it makes a lot more sense to me, so I immediately flip the board when I'm playing Black now that I'm playing online, so maybe I'll try giving it a third read once I have more practice playing online, as all the graphs will finally make sense to me now.

I like Capablanca and Chess960 for the same reason these grandmasters invented them, that they were tired of drawing every game (although I'm not nearly that good and probably never will be) and they didn't like how competitive Chess had become all about book openings. I really like the dynamic nature of 960 having to wing it almost every single game and in Gothic, apparently the board is so overwhelming lethal that stalemates almost never happen, and if there's any standard play in that variant, it's probably pretty underground and I'll only learn it from experience by losing a lot.

What I need to do based on my experience playing the new version of Fairy Stockfish, which plays way better than it used to at lower strengths (Level 2 is just way too easy then Level 3 I realized I need to only play when I'm of a completely clear mind and give myself way more time than people play online to think, and that would be another suggestion I have, is to add more levels of strength as it seems like there's no middle ground for my own level of skill) and the advice of a highly ranked Bullet player on this site, is that I really need to study the Checkmate patterns if I want to improve my play, because what I end up doing is come up with some way to strip Stockfish down to a bare king or endless check once I'm pretty sure I've won and then figure out some way to Checkmate it from there, and then when I finally take a look at the game on the Analysis board, I actually have M4 or something and don't even realize it. I'll go check it out right now. Thank you.

Edit: Hmm, seems like pychess doesn't have Gothic, only Capablanca, but that's ok, I'll have fun anyway. I'm also concerned about there being a way smaller playerbase to play rated games against.

@Zanno960 said in #3:

> Edit: Hmm, seems like pychess doesn't have Gothic, only Capablanca, but that's ok, I'll have fun anyway. I'm also concerned about there being a way smaller playerbase to play rated games against.

Yes it does. Select Capablanca, then under "alternate start" you will see Gothic. What we call "Capablanca" has actually existed since like the 18th century with different opening arrangements. Capablanca was just the most recent famous proponent. So, all those different starting positions are under Capablanca.

I'm glad 960 is finally taking off. The Freestyle Grand Slam is a huge event with all the biggest chess stars. I enjoy orthodox chess, but theory consumes more and more of player's energy and makes memory too central to the game I think. It's sort of as if in order to get a book published you had to first win a spelling bee. I think chess's closest relative is music, and I would say playing orthodox chess in the era of extreme theory is basically like playing a variation on a theme of a classical composer. Chess 960 brings back opening improvisation, and will hopefully usher in the jazz age of chess.

@seveer said in #4:
> Yes it does. Select Capablanca, then under "alternate start" you will see Gothic.

Oh, thank you, I did not see that because I didn't attempt to start any games as I only got 4 hours of sleep and wasn't in the mood to start a game.

Also, I have a bug report. Solving the Chess Captcha with my mouse on mobile causes the screen to randomly slide up very far, and there was a similar bug with Rufus on Amazon when they introduced it by typing on my bluetooth keyboard, so there must be some glitch in the programming with how it handles the features of mouse and keyboard support on the new version of Android.