Many organizers like mix things up to make their events unique and interesting. What would excite you the most beside the World Championship?
– Fischer Random match (Serious 6-12 games match between 2 chess superstars)
– Man vs. Machine match (Example: Kasparov or Kramnik vs. Junior / Fritz)
– Man vs. Woman (Example: Karpov and me twice)
– Team Championships (Example: German or Spanish League)
– Another choice of yours? 
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
Fischer Random with Kasparov, Karpov and Bobby Fischer.
At my college club, we play regular chess, then we play 10-min bughouse for fun. Everyone always has a good time playing bughouse.
Man vs Machine. This is always interesting and, besides, at least one of the players won’t use the toilet 😉
Good point paulo, but then someone will be using a computer…You could expect it to make 100% accurate moves.
Before I comment on this.
Let me tell you a story.
I’ll try to make it short.
Long ago I wrote a chess program for
the Motorola 6809 8-bit computer.
I once tested it on a friend of mine
who had won the swedish title 3 times.
The progran could only see about 7 plys (halfmoves)
ahead, had no book but aimed for complexity.
Me and 2 friends sat in my kitchen at my student home with a SWTPC display hocked up to my computer. My room was to small for 3 persons.
Nisse, as we can call the champion here,
told us after a while that he was happy with his position. And complained:
Why must I wait 5 minutes for each move? My other friend who was
just learning chess (rather sucessfully)
at the age of about 20,
served him coffey and we told him that this is not over yet.
After a while we laught and told him that the computer will fork you in 4
moves and get a piece from you!
NOO! that is not possible, he shouted in his common way,
but after some thinking he got all swety fearing to loose.
Of course he won the endgame.
But he never did play against my program again.
I used to ask him every time I got new hardware (the program has’nt changed much in 30 years because lack of innterest and new ideas),
but he always refused to play.
On the other hand I refuse to meet him in any official game since I have 1.5-0.5 against him in tournaments and am happy with the figures.
—
Now back to “What do You fancy?”
Round about 1990 Nisse told me that he gotten some respect of computerchess, but that machine will never beat humans in chess.
My reply was that this could already have been acheived if there was’nt
more useful things to do with computers.
Before year 2000 it will happen anyway, I told him.
Nils-Gustaf got sad, and said:
– What shall people like me then do?
– Do’nt worry. Humans can find out
new rules on a squared board that fit our brains better than the old game.
Futhermore I now say that it is due
time to change these 400 year old rules to something better.
Napoleon had his bad ideas.
Capablanca had his good ideas wich the Gothic Chess Federation tries
to develop.
Fishers ideas is much easier to implement for a start. I often wonder why they have never been tryed out in a big mach or tournament.
But I myself would go for some form of Gothic Chess with an Chinese river on board.
Conclusion:
Most brigt ideas have been rejected
simply by the fact that nobody knows
how they work in practice.
So Susan,
Go for a match against Fisher!
His rules are not much of a change
to the old game. The game Draughts
has long ago been reformed in a similar way. Do not be afraid of using random devices. Even the game of Backgammon survives allthough
the dices are used all the time.
“Team” match:
several GMs on each side,
take turn to play on a same
chessboard, no communication
among teammates.
The point is to see if each
GM can understand the idea
behind his/her teammates
previous moves. Perhaps the Polgar sisters can form
a team!
One of my personal favorites is the Melody Amber Tournament! It combines two exciting formats against the same opponent each day and it is very fun to watch. The other thing that is great about it is the talent that participate, such as Morozevich, Anand, Topalov, Svilder, Leko, Krammnik and many more.
– Every day, the grandmasters play one rapid game and one blindfold game of about one hour each. The blindfold games will be played with computers. An empty chessboard will appear on the player’s screen. The moves are made with a mouse or with the keyboard. Each move will appear on both screens. After confirmation of receipt, the opponent’s clock will start and the move will disappear. However, the arbiter and the spectators can follow the entire game on monitors that are not visible to the grandmasters.
I would love to see a FischerRandom event.
How about a freestyle chess tournament where the big names get involved? Aim for the highest quality chess possible.
What is freestyle chess?
“Fischer Random” (without the bizarre castling rules) or Gothic Chess.
Fischer Random
frankly spoken – any live broadcast of a round robin tournament (like Linares or Dortmund or or or or or Tal memorial) with some of the “big guns” turns “on” my interest
-i like it a lot to watch the games – picking one of them on my real chess board aside – to replay and think about the moves done and undone. sometimes i turn my second comp on, to analyze ideas, positions or moves i did not understand – i’m using fritz 5.32 and 7.0 (mostly) and 9.0 – and other chess proggies on my more powerful desktop pc…
i did not need chess software to realize … ra7+ to be a blunder – i simply have known it (old schooled training – i’m old … :))
to be honest – this blunder gave me hope … the compu-kids are not bulletproof – goddam-rating…
i like to watch tournaments – for sure!
Pelle wrote:
{
I now say that it is due time to change these 400 year old rules to something better.
…
Fischer’s idea is much easier to implement for a start. I often wonder why they have never been tried out in a big match or tournament.
}
I agree. History has shown the rules of chess change every few hundred years. There are increasing reasons to foresee future changes, the continuation of history’s already proven lesson.
Here in Washington state (USA), I can see Mount Ranier from my window. It looks like it always has to me, dormant. But I would be a fool to think Mt. Ranier is dead as a volcano. Rather Mt. Ranier is alive and changing, just on a long time scale my human way of thinking is crummy at detecting.
And so it is with the rules of chess. There would be no way to defend an assertion that “The rules of chess are stable and unchanging now in our modern world, and there will be no more changes in the future”.
Even already in 2006 there are major rule changes in use, in very important events! I mean big rule changes.
In Kramnik-Topalov 2006, the match rules were prepared in tie-break to award the “unified” chess1 world champ title to which ever player would win a game of Armageddon Chess (Black wins if he can achieve what would be a draw in chess1 rules).
The Slugfest7.com BAP tournament in 2006/10 had some overlap with this armageddon concept.
In Mainz Germany a well funded chess960 (Fischer Random Chess, ChessTigers.de) tournament is held every August. This attracks a lot of attention in the chess world. It has been going on so long now that it is no longer an experiment. This chess960 event has become a tradition of its own.
Gene Milener
http://CastleLong.com/
P.S. Gothic Chess might have a future IF it randomly chooses which ONE piece will start for the queen (just before start of each game): the queen, chancellor, or archbishop. Increasing the size of the board is awful.
P.S.S. The current castling rules of chess960 are okay, tho they could be better (re-engineered to cause more opposite wing castling, thus fewer draws).
But the “king’s leap” idea is detrimental, in my opinion.
I’d love to see Kramnik play Deep Fritz but they’ll never put together a match like that. Ever!
Of the four choices given, Fischerandom with top-flight players is the best.
I’d love to see a public FR match with Bobby against anybody, but I am doubtful that it will ever happen. Every time there’s a rumor, it goes nowhere.
I think there is no longer much suspense in man vs. computer matches, and they really don’t have much to do with chess.
FRC without the wierd castling rules is effectively Shuffle Chess, which is hundreds of years old. The other two differences is that the rooks are not required to be on each side of the king, and the bishops are not required to be on opposite-colored squares.
Amber Melody is an awesome event to relay. OTB bughouse is an awesome game that has enough swings and enough shuffling of hands to satisfy non-chessplaying audiences.
How about a match between Susan and Judit?
What is freestyle chess?
Freestyle chess is where there are no restrictions on aids. You can use computers, databases, work as a team etc. Freestyle chess tournaments are usually won by a decent player working with a computer – this outperforms a computer by itself. But I’ve never seen a top GM get involved. I’d find that very interesting – much more so than a man vs machine match.
e.g. Kramnik & Fritz vs Topalov & Rybka vs Anand & Shredder vs …
I would love to see a match where there are no points given for draws.
Mr Gene Milener
I read on the web:
Mt. Rainier is one of a score of volcanoes in the Cascades, from Northern California to British Columbia. Seven Cascades volcanoes have erupted in the past 200 years. All are smoking guns.
In Sundsvall, where i was born, our local vulcano had its latest eruption 560 000 000 years ago and is now compleatly burried under ground due to the iceages. The typographie of the current landscape was formed 1.3-1.8 Gigayears ago by more violent events than vulcanes so all the old peaks are now beautifully shaped, but can still be called mountains since they are about 300 meters in hight.
(personally i like the still young Swiss alps better, at least in the summer)
These historical facts leads me to suggest that almost any abrupt change to chess rules can be applied with great force. Time will then take care of the rest. From almost
any hight and complexity we will soon wear it down to a beautiful game that we can call chess again.
(if we keep the checkered board)
I hereby redraw my former suggestion that progress can be acheived by small steps forward!
Something radical must be done before our terrain becomes compleatly flat. I hope that you all will agree with me as soon as the human involvence in “freestyle chess” is finally proved not only to
be obsolete, but at a great disadvantage.
If we still would like to call this our beloved game, a game in which you have to use your brains, also utilising intuition and fantasy, we can not allow our simple pocket computers to beat us all the time by the use of table lookup and simple reckoning.
This Google reference maps to Swedens first discovered volcano.
http://maps.google.com/maps?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=reckonig&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF-8&om=1&z=11&ll=62.440606,17.440796&spn=0.201732,0.617294&t=h&iwloc=A