Chess960 – pros and cons

The third world chess champion, José Raúl Capablanca, believed that chess would be played out in a few decades, with draw being the inevitable result at top level. He came up with his own chess variant, played on a bigger chess board and incorporating 2 new pieces, trying to turn the chess fight into something more complex.

The eleventh world champion, Robert James Fischer, expressed similar concerns, envisioning the “draw death” of chess caused by the incredible development of chess theory. His solution? Another chess variant, where the position of the pieces on the first rank would be randomized. His style of chess was initially known as “Fischer random”. Currently most people refer to it as “chess960”, since there are 960 different starting positions. Other names for it are “freestyle chess” or “chess 9LX”. The idea is simple – the rules are essentially the same, but the entire “home cooking” part in the opening is rendered useless and the game would be decided by pure playing strength.

The 5-time world champion and strongest chess player of all times, Magnus Carlsen, decided not to defend his title after his 2021 victory against Nepomniachtchi, and started to focus more on fast time control games and chess960. The main reason was the same – the fact that modern opening preparation has become so powerful and deep that a well prepared opponent can basically “kill the game” and reach very dry equal positions by force – a strategy used by many of his opponents. The stronger player has only 2 options – play a more complex but objectively inferior opening line, or play principled best-move chess just to test the opponent’s preparation and memory.

Top engines, much stronger than any human player, paint the same picture. Any mainline opening, if played correctly, leads to complete equality. Capablanca’s intuition was right.

It comes as no surprise that Magnus and other top players are trying to make chess960 more popular. With the right sponsors, they might succeed. Some people love the idea, others hate it, and most are somewhere in-between.

PROS

  • No opening preparation. For most players, it’s already a daunting task to memorize their current opening repertoire, and that would be just one starting position out of 960.
  • Since everything about the starting position feels new, the fight starts very early in the game. There are important strategic decisions to be made as early as move 1.
  • Early tactics are common. It’s not unusual to see even top grandmasters losing a pawn or even a piece in the opening stage of the game, because they cannot rely on the tactical patterns they’re used to.
  • There is a lot of room for creativity. Playing a gambit in a chess960 game is a matter of intuition and feel for the game. Playing a gambit in something like the poisoned pawn variation of the Najdorf is a matter of spending weeks trying to understand engine novelties at move 30. As they say, nowadays we all have the same coach and read the same opening book, authored by Stockfish.
  • Even if the starting position is sometimes “weird”, as the game progresses it looks more and more like regular chess. The concepts we are familiar with regarding king safety, piece activity, space, pawn structures and so on are still valid, the importance of being able to calculate correctly is still the same. The strongest chess players in classical chess are still on top in chess960.
  • The percentage of draws is much lower. There is no safe way to reach an equal middlegame or endgame. There is no well known move repetition in the opening. Mirroring white’s moves usually does not work, on the contrary.
  • Very often the games are wild and double edged. Without the safety blanket provided by the opening preparation, both players feel uncertain about what’s going on in the initial stage of the game, and that simply makes it more fun to play and watch. The fact that players lose orientation early can be seen as a disadvantage as well.

CONS

  • Some starting positions simply look very “ugly”, there is no piece harmony, both sides are struggling to get developed.
  • Certain starting positions are objectively better for white. However, the advantage is probably not more than +0.6, at least according to Sesse.
  • Since white’s edge can be bigger in some positions compared to others, it would be fair to play pairs of games (one with each color, same starting position). That leads to other problems, since in the second game the player with the black pieces already has an idea of what to do (or what not to do) – even more so if there was enough time to check with an engine.
  • Most chess players have spent a huge amount of time studying current opening theory. Was all of that in vain, wasted time? They would feel betrayed. Part of the rich legacy of the game of chess would be lost.
  • Given the complexity of a fresh opening position, fast time controls lead to way too much randomness and silly blunders. To get something that resembles decent chess, long time controls are needed.
  • There is a lack of continuity, it’s hard to learn from opening mistakes, because it’s unlikely to ever reach the same opening position in the future.
  • The ability to spend countless hours trying to find new ideas in the opening can be seen as a chess skill. That would no longer be the case in chess960.

I confess that I enjoy watching chess960 played by strong GMs. I find even the ugly positions or early mistakes more entertaining than another boring draw in the Berlin defense. But I don’t think it will replace classical chess any time soon. Any other opinions are welcome, feel free to comment.

Category: Chess concepts, Chess engines, Scientific research | LEAVE A COMMENT

The engine score doesn’t tell the full story

It is common nowadays to have some chess engine running while analyzing a game, an opening line or even following a live GM event. We all know how strong chess engines are. As an example, the very popular Stockfish is around 800 rating points higher than Magnus Carlsen, the best chess player of all times. The difference between Stockfish and Magnus is similar to the difference between Magnus and a random club level player. It makes sense to have almost complete faith in the numbers provided by the engine when evaluating the position from a game in progress.

Indeed, the numbers are right. But that’s only if we assume perfect play, something that we, as humans, are not capable of. The “patzer with the engine running” might see a score of +3 and assume that white is easily winning, then laugh when the grandmaster playing that position fails to win it (or even loses). The most important thing to understand is that the score does not refer to the current position on the board. The +3 evaluation is what the engine thinks about the position reached after a certain number of moves, if both follow what the engine deems to be the correct path (best moves for both sides). Strong chess players are very good at assessing quiet positions, where not much is happening. They can fully understand a pawn up position where the other side has no significant counterplay, and would win that game most of the times, even if the current engine score is just +1. But the same strong chess players can have a very hard time winning a position where the score is a lot higher, because they fail to find the very narrow path leading to that big advantage. This should be easy to understand if we take it to the extreme. Imagine a position where white is a full queen down, but there is a forced mate in 8 moves. If the player doesn’t see the (potentially difficult/hidden) path to checkmate, he would regard his current position as dead lost (queen down).

So … whenever I hear someone say things like “I lost a +5 position”, my question is “what kind of +5?” Was it a rook up in an endgame? Then it’s really sad, the player did something terribly wrong. Huge time trouble, horrible technique, rushing … could be a number of things. But if that +5 score only flashed for a brief moment and was predicated on finding a particular tactic, it can happen to anyone.

I will take one of my games as an example. I think it shows quite clearly the difference between a static and a dynamic advantage, and how the engine score given at various points of the game does not tell the full story.

Lessons to learn?

  • In very dynamic positions, the engine score can paint a picture that has little to do with what the players see and feel during the actual game
  • “Understanding” is overestimated in master games. In general, all master level players have a good grasp of the fundamental notions of positional play. But some masters are 2100, and others are 2800.
  • The ability to calculate concrete variations quickly and without missing important candidate moves was, is, and always will be the most important chess skill. It’s a point made by my favorite book as well.
  • Good time management is essential. The game is often times decided by a tactical sequence. It has the bad habit of occuring when players have only a few minutes left on their clocks.

Category: Chess engines, My games | LEAVE A COMMENT