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Reinhard Scharnagl wrote on Sat, Jan 8, 2005 06:07 PM UTC:

Why filter random positions based on Capablanca' extended board?

Let's talk first on FRC (I have written a small book on that in German language). One main intention to create FRC (or Chess960) has been to make it impossible to provide a complete opening theory for each position. Thus the number of 960 distinct starting positions is helpful to reach that goal. Uncovered pawns are not that problematic because any situation will have to be set up randomly very short before a game starts.

Looking at the Shogi game there are indeed three uncovered pawns in the beginning and the game still does exist today.

Capablanca's chess is somehow different to that because of the huge number of possible starting arrays viewing all shuffled combinations. But during the history from Carrera to Bird, Capablanca [through to contemporary versions] it has been a point of critic and missing acceptance of that extended board. So it could not be counter productive to select special starting arrays which seem to be positionally better constructed, without reducing the huge number of possible initial positions too much.

That leads to the both new rules: a) placing Queen and Archbishop (Archangel) at different colored squares, and b) avoiding unprotected pawns. I cannot see any negative payload connected with this two additional demands. More then 20.000 possibilities should be sufficient.

Also see a nice SMIRF (providing both: FRC and CRC) preview at: http://www.chessbox.de/_tmp/SmirfPrototyp.png


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