Single Comment

Capablanca's chess. An enlarged chess variant, proposed by Capablanca. (10x8, Cells: 80) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

J Andrew Lipscomb wrote on Wed, Sep 28, 2005 04:30 AM UTC:

'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.'

I think the problem is more a matter of the piece set and shape of the
board. Even if a pawn is undefended in a Fischerandom setup, it can't be
attacked instantly, unless it's an a/b/g/h pawn and the piece on its
diagonal is a bishop or queen. But an archbishop or chancellor has a
pretty good chance of being able to make an instant attack on that pawn by
jumping over its own pawn row (as the chancellor can indeed do to the
i-pawn in Capablanca's setup), and the diagonal discovered attack can
affect 80% of the pawns instead of half.

Upon further review, we're discussing opposite ends of the issue. The
points I just made are why the no-undefended-pawn rule is desirable; the
large number of positions is what makes it practical (i. e. you still have
a huge pool of positions to choose from).