3 ms·

The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are, so I doubt there’s much value in any of them. I don’t think any of them address the main

The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are, so I doubt there’s much value in any of them. I don’t think any of them address the main complaints about chess either, which as far as I can tell are: 1) It’s too drawish 2) It requires too much memorization to learn Fischer Random or similar variants solve both of those problems very well. But they sacrifice one of the things that a lot of people actually love about chess, which is that chess as a body of knowledge is continually growing forever. You can learn something about chess today by reading Morphy’s games from the 19th century, and any time you play or watch a game today you’re most likely going to see a brand new game of chess, that nobody’s ever seen before (and if it’s a top level game it could be a very interesting brand new game of chess). I personally doubt tinkering with mechanics has any improvements to offer chess, and I don’t think most people actually want the most frequently complained about “problems” with the game to actually be fixed.

mlyle 5y ago
> The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are, Classical, white wins 18/1000 and black wins 3/1000 with 1 minute per move. Semi-torpedo, this is 27 & 6/1000, so it's both less imbalanced and less drawish than classical chess with very high level play. (White's 6x advantage is reduced to 4.5x). It also has a slightly richer set of interesting moves per position on average. A bit more imbalance in other variants isn't a catastrophic problem, either, IMO, with tournaments consisting of multiple games and equal numbers of games as white and black. Your other point-- yes, any benefits of tinkering with the rules needs to be balanced against what it does to the traditions and continuity of the history of the game.

mlyle 5y ago

> The self-play stats show how massively imba all those suggestions are, Classical, white wins 18/1000 and black wins 3/1000 with 1 minute per move. Semi-torpedo, this is 27 & 6/1000, so it's both less imbalanced and less drawish than classical chess with very high level play. (White's 6x advantage is reduced to 4.5x). It also has a slightly richer set of interesting moves per position on average. A bit more imbalance in other variants isn't a catastrophic problem, either, IMO, with tournaments consisting of multiple games and equal numbers of games as white and black. Your other point-- yes, any benefits of tinkering with the rules needs to be balanced against what it does to the traditions and continuity of the history of the game.