Comments by crazytom

Of course this match alone can tell us only about Svidler and Aronian, but this match is not taking place out of the blue. Lékó became the first Chess960 champion by defeating Adams in 2001. Svidler won the title from Lékó in 2003, and has defended it against Aronian in 2004 and against Almasi in 2005. I've read that the challenger must qualify by winning an open tournament, but it's harder than it should be to find such information from official sources.

It seems to me that Svidler's status as Chess960 champion is more legitimate than that of either Kramnik or Topalov as Chess champion.

My reply to George Duke's last comment will be offtopic on the Slide-shuffle page, but I'll post it anyway.

First, at least they're covering it!  As one who enjoys both chess and many of its variants, I'm glad that this event is held, and I'm glad that it's reported on.

Certainly the interjection of 'not the pawns' was not the most marvelous piece of prose ever written, and I too derived brief amusement from imagining the many permutations of eight identical pawns.  But presumably the author was simply attempting to clarify that pawns are not shuffled together with the pieces -- i.e. you never get pawns on the back rank and pieces on the second.

More importantly, the ChessBase article does not claim that Fischer was the first to propose randomized starting positions.  It simply states (correctly) that FRC/Chess960 was originally proposed by Fischer.  Remember that the purpose of this article is to report on a particular event in Mainz, not to provide a lengthy and exhaustive treatise on the history of every chess variant with any similarity to the one being played.

There's no disinformation here.

I have a couple of quibbles, though, about probability. In my view, a good randomizing algorithm must ensure that all positions occur with equal probability (unless there's a good reason to do otherwise).

1st quibble: When same-color bishops are allowed, it's best to treat the bishops the same as any other piece, and simply not think about square colors when placing the bishops. If you use procedure 3.2, you'll skew the probabilities. For example, let's check the numbers for Modern Random Chess. [I'll use the notation _nC_r to denote the binomial coefficient 'n choose r'.] Suppose we place the bishops first, before any other pieces. We have 9 squares on which to place 2 bishops, so there are ₉C₂ = 36 possible placements for the pair. Let's see how these stack up in terms of color configuration, noting that the first rank has 5 dark and 4 light squares. There are ₅C₂ = 10 placements with both bishops on dark squares, ₄C₂ = 6 placements with both on light squares, and (₅C₁) (₄C₁) = 20 placements with one bishop on each color. But procedure 3.2 generates dark-dark placements with probability 1/4, light-light placements with probability 1/4, and light-dark placements with probability 1/2. This means that light-light placements will occur 50% more often than they should, and the others will occur less often than they should.

2nd quibble: With the constraint that the king must be placed between the two rooks, it's dangerous to place one type of piece before the other as in procedure 4.2–4.3. In Fischer Random Chess, for example, there are 108 positions with the white king on b1, 168 with the king on c1, 204 on d1, 204 on e1, 168 on f1, and 108 on g1. But if the king is placed first, it goes to any of these six squares with equal probability. (Note also that the Game Courier preset uses this method; thus FRC as implemented in Game Courier is biased toward positions with the kings on the flanks.) It's safer to leave the kings and rooks until the end as in 4.1.

I'd like to sign up, provided the time controls are such that I can safely average 1 to 1.5 moves per game per day.  If I had been in time to suggest a game, I probably would have suggested Extinction Chess.  But the six selections look like a good set of games.

Just in case it's being seriously considered, I'll say that I'm not a fan of Sam Trenholme's proposal for adjudication of long games.  If the point of the tournament for most of us is to try out new games, it would be a shame to be deprived of an interesting endgame.

And they're playing on a large board.

It's not a cheat; it's just the way this Elephant moves.  There's no law saying every piece's moves have to have the full symmetry of the board.

In fact this Elephant is very interesting, because the Elephant is colorbound on one coloring of the board, while the Knight is colorchanging on another coloring.  It should be fun to watch them interact.  (Reminds me a bit of Alice Chess, where the Bishop and Knight are both colorbound, but on different colorings.)

If there is an injured party, I don't think it's me.  I was surprised by the repeat pairing but didn't realize it was a mistake.

Despite my 0-2 score, I didn't feel hopelessly overmatched in those two games.  In the first game I may have been winning, but underestimated the importance of king safety against a rampant marshal.  In the second game I had an extra pawn and a decent position until I blundered a major piece.  Even if the pairings had been different, I could have blundered against any opponent.

I don't think any correction is needed as far as I'm concerned.

Whenever someone announces a system for beating the house, one should check
carefully before believing it.  If my computation is correct, the proposed
algorithm leads to an expected loss of about $41.57.

For those few individuals with a sufficiently large bankroll to survive
the possible large loss, this game might be mostly harmless, and perhaps
it's an amusing way to blow 42 bucks.  But I wouldn't recommend it as an
investment strategy.