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57 sats \ 7 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 Feb \ parent \ on: Magnus Carlsen On Why the Future of Chess Lies in Freestyle (The Economist) Stacker_Sports
It's also called Chess960, because there are 960 possible starting positions, iirc.
I was never interested in learning the sequences of openings and closings, which makes it hard to play chess with anyone who enjoys chess.
I recall a study that showed even master chess players aren't much better than average, when starting with randomized boards.
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I wonder what level of players that study used though, because a fascinating thing about Chess960 tournaments is that a lot of the best classical players still end up at the top.
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It's been a while since I saw it, but they weren't even doing Chess960. They were actually randomly placing pieces on the board, often in configurations that never occur in a real game.
The other part I'm wondering about now is power. Even if there were no statistically significant advantage found in the study, that doesn't mean there's not enough real advantage to see a difference over the course of a tournament.
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Might be a different effect, 1-50, 50-99th percentilen versus the top 1 or top 0.001%
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Might be true.
Most of my advancing up the (chess.com) ranks was from learning a handful of openings really well.
I mean, I still hang my queen now and again to completely fuck myself, but I do get very nice/dominant positions
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or Fischer Random
It was Bobby Fischer who introduced it, because he was sick spending so much time on opening memory.
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Yup
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