Women World Fischer Random Championship 2019 Next Month in USA

[Nordlandia]

Because people are not willing to accept that Chess960 is FullChess. Position #518 is 1/960

[Ovyron]

How can it be FullChess if it's just a subset of my Chess921600 variant?

[jp]

Chess960 is a generalization.

In chess, you can only castle if ...

You don't seem to understand the meaning of "generalization" (although I partly explained it).

[Ovyron]

Chess960's generalization of castling is more arbitrary than anything. Like, why does the King need to be between the two rooks? If a King can move all the way from b1 to g1 to castle (a king moving 5 squares, how chess-like!) why not just allow it to castle with either rook if it starts on h1? Or castle long with either rook if it starts on h1? There's no sense or reason as to why the castling of starting position 518 (where to castle the king moves two squares to either side) is used as the basis of landing squares for rooks and kings of other positions.

Let's take a look at position 534, the evil twin of chess's starting position:

[d]rnbkqbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBKQBNR w - -

Suppose that the game's history in our world happened a bit differently, and that modern chess used this position instead of the one with queens and kings reversed. Tell me, honestly, how do you expect that castling would be like?

Well, the king would move two steps towards the rook and the rook would jump over the king to land on its side. And how do you expect Chess960 of that world to be like? The king would end in the b column when castling long and on the f column when castling long. But why? Why would position 534 be used as the basis for generalized castling?

This generalized castling only makes sense on the 48 positions that are chess-like, and for the rest the king has no reason to end at the same place it'd end on position 518.

Lest we can create many other variants where kings and rooks end in arbitrary places when castling.

[jp]

Chess960's generalization of castling is more arbitrary than anything.

The generalization is not unique. But there's only a small number of simple generalizations (around three or four) that we can think up.

[Ovyron]

And all of them are worse than getting rid of castling, which is chess (since all the games where both sides decided to not castle are clearly still chess.)

[jp]

getting rid of castling, which is chess (since all the games where both sides decided to not castle are clearly still chess.)

Getting rid of chess may be an interesting variant (Kramnik seems to think so), but again you are using a bad argument. Two players could decide never to move their pawns in a game and that would be a (bad) chess game. That wouldn't mean a game that forbids pawn moves would "still be chess".

[Ovyron]

Getting rid of chess may be an interesting variant (Kramnik seems to think so), but again you are using a bad argument. Two players could decide never to move their pawns in a game and that would be a (bad) chess game. That wouldn't mean a game that forbids pawn moves would "still be chess".

Well, assume that I'm only talking about games where the best chess moves didn't include castling, so castling being there or not made no difference. If those are possible but games where the best moves don't include pawn moves are impossible then your comparison doesn't hold.

What is really weird is that you consider "no castling" a variant (even though I can show you a game where both sides didn't castle and you wouldn't be able to tell if it's normal chess or the variant) but "king moves from g1 to c1 when long castling" is still chess (even though anyone in the world that knows chess but not FRC would consider that illegal), seems you have it backwards.

[jp]

What is really weird is that you consider "no castling" a variant (even though I can show you a game where both sides didn't castle and you wouldn't be able to tell if it's normal chess or the variant) but "king moves from g1 to c1 when long castling" is still chess, seems you have it backwards.

Again, you seem to be struggling with the concept of what a generalization is. Chess960 includes traditional chess as a subset. Games that are variants but not generalizations (name your favourite) do not.

The king moves from g1 because the larger game allows it to start there. Obviously that is not the one single allowed starting position in traditional chess, so if you insist on that one single allowed starting position then you will hate Chess960 whatever the move rules are.

You are at liberty to like or hate any game, but you try to make it sound like your subjective likes and dislikes are somehow objective, using bogus arguments.

[Ovyron]

Chess960 includes traditional chess as a subset. Games that are variants but not generalizations (name your favourite) do not.

How a superset behaves has nothing to do with the superset being one of its sets or not. As an example I bring about this variant that also includes traditional chess as a subset:

Card Chess

There's 2 packs of cards with all the pieces of chess shuffled, one pack for each color, there's 8 pawns, 2 Rooks, 2 Knights, 2 Bishops, the Queen and the King. The cards are shuffled. Then players draw cards from the deck and fill their side of the board with the piece that the card says. White fills a2-b2-c2-d2-e2-f2-g2-h2-a1-b1-c1-d1-e1-f1-g1-h1, black fills a7-b7-c7-d7-e7-f7-g7-h7-a8-b8-c8-d8-e8-f8-g8-h8. After this is done, if there's a King on the second row, it is swapped with the piece on the first row, and if there's a King on the seventh row, it is swapped for the piece on the 8th row.

White pawns on the 1st and 2nd row can double jump, and black pawns on the 7th and 8th row can double jump. We don't check if they have moved, so you can play something like pawn a1-a2, and pawn a2-a4 in a future more.

After this set up white plays the first move normally and using all the rules of chess.

Now, this is a superset of chess, because if the cards are in this order after being shuffled:

White:
PPPPPPPPRBNQKNBR

Black:
PPPPPPPPRBNQKNBR

You get a chess game.

Now, I'd say it's only chess if this configuration does happen to be shuffled, but for most games it won't be chess. Would you still say this is chess and not a variant?