It doesn't really matter, since every position with 24 pieces can change into one with fewer. So you need the sum of all of those values. For a more sophistica

It doesn't really matter, since every position with 24 pieces can change into one with fewer. So you need the sum of all of those values. For a more sophisticated estimation of the number of legal positions, taking into account _true_ legality (a legal position must be reachable by a sequence of legal moves from the starting position, however dumb), see https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking. You can probably filter their sample by number of pieces to gain pretty accurate estimations for number of 29-piece positions if you wish.