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January 20, 2008

Fischer Random . . .

. . . is the chess variant Bobby Fischer championed late in life, I learn from IcelandReview. Also known as Chess960, because there are 960 possible starting positions. See David A. Wheeler; Wikipedia; The Chess Variants Pages.

Posted by Jim Henley @ 11:20 am, Filed under: Main

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4 Responses to “Fischer Random . . .”

  1. Comment by diana —
    January 20, 2008 @ 11:31 am

    I came across that article in my net-ramblings.

    “Nobody subscribed to his extreme views but people saw that he was a sick man needing help.”

    Fischer was crazy from the start but it seems to me that his descent into an extreme form of paranoia was kicked off by real persecution: the government prosecuting him for violating sanctions on Yugoslavia. (The Clinton Government!)

    Gee, you’d think that maybe the US could have rustled up some sympathy for an obviously disturbed man, who never actually hurt anyone, who was American?

    Oh the irony: Boris Spassky, born in a Communist police-state, went on to live the good life in France, and was not sanctioned, because the French are rational about these things.

    Fischer, the greatest American chess player ever (I won’t get into an argument about “greatest ever” — but he was surely the greatest American ever), ends up in a ton of legal troubles.

    Sometimes the intellectual level of this country makes me very depressed.

  2. Comment by joe —
    January 20, 2008 @ 11:36 am

    I once put an opponent in check with a queen-side castle, and saw the possibility 5 moves before.

    That’s the high point of my chess career. I still can’t believe it worked.

  3. Comment by greenish —
    January 20, 2008 @ 2:56 pm

    Fischer random is a blast to play. All kinds of weird and unusual things can happen there. I played a game once where my opponent was very aggressive, and I just set my pieces all defending themselves, forming a strange knot that one could instantly recognize at a distance as being impossible in standard play; eventually he got me by lining up his two bishops and queen, which he could do because we were playing Fischer random and the bishops had been placed on the same color.

  4. Comment by GeneM —
    January 26, 2008 @ 6:47 pm

    Bobby Fischer advocated FRC-chess960 because he disliked the effects of today’s highly repetitious openings in traditional chess1 at the grandmaster level. Fine, but…

    An even bigger reason to add FRC into the brotherhood of chess is to finally see all the interesting new tasks and positional ideas that have long been hidden from us by chess1. There are soooo many examples, but for this little blog post I could quickly note that castling in chess1 is so brain dead that kiddies and world champions alike end up with the same couple of castled king forts as each other, most of the time. Not so in FRC.

    Like ‘greenish’ wrote (1/20 2:56), the positions arising from FRC are notice-ably different than anything chess1 can produce. Yet the FRC positions are every bit as logical. They feel very “fresh”, but most of all it feels like you are just playing chess (not any variant). I swear, after the first 6 move-pairs your attention will be on chess, not on the different start position.

    Fritz9 added the ability to play chess960.

    No shame in mentioning…
    Search Amazon.com for “chess960″, if you are interested in the only chess book so far that looks at the strategies and effects of FRC itself. My book was published in 2006.

    Thanks.
    http://www.CastleLong.com/

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