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Chess with Different Armies. Betza's classic variant where white and black play with different sets of pieces. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Aurelian Florea wrote on Fri, Oct 12, 2018 02:45 PM UTC:

I thought a bit about Greg's proposal of weakening the charging rook (and his earlier proposal of weakening the Bede). I personally see big flaws with such a approach as the state space of the problem has at least 4 dimensions (16 if you consider playing white or black different things).  There could be a solution but first remember the the state space of the possible solutions is linked to the choosing of the pieces out of a small possible set, is it is probably non-neglijable likely to plainly not be able to succeed as the demands ar pretty tight. My proposal for getting out of the impasse is to combine the CWDA with musketeer chess. But instead of offering many options we may give a set of gating pieces for each of the 16 encounters (let's include FFvsFF here as they could receive slightly different pieces in order to compensate for playing white.). They can be just one piece of a general value of approximately 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or maybe pairs of the same or different pieces. Pairs of approximately 2.5 pieces seems quite interesting to me, as 2 of them worth exactly a rook and for one of them you may capture a regular minor and give up some positional or capture 2 pawns and earn some minor positional bonus.

For example in the FFvsFF encounter which in regular Betza is banned I think white should be able to gate two ffbbNsD and black should be able to gate two ffNsDbbLbH. Maybe the second piece is actaully worse but at first glance more jumping retreats should be better, be them longer. They also add to versatility especially in the endgame. Such pieces should worth around 6.5/8 knights=0.8125 knights=0.8125*3.25 pawns=2.640625 pawns=2.65 pawns, so pretty good.

Another reason Betza's implied (and indeed not stated) principle of armies with different styles should be preserved. The gating piece would probably be counter style, though in order to compensate for the misshapen of that particular matchup.