Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Chess960: Seeing the strategy from the first move

I played SP121 today and could see a clear strategy from the first move. I looked up the Chess960 database and any other database of human players I could find, to see if others could also see this strategy that seems to me to be very obvious (but I have played more than two thousand Chess960 games already).

SP121: Can you see the obvious strategy here?

 Here are the central features of the strategy that either side can play:
  1. Kingside castling is very likely since it will take too long and the queen will be too restricted, to make queenside castling plausible.
  2. With two heavy pieces on the queenside (Q+R), pushing the b-c pawns seems very likely.
  3. The titular bishop pair in the center of the board will have very clear roles on this occasion, they will work in tandem to sit on the queenside and take aim at the kingside, working in cooperation with the queen to form powerful diagonal batteries.
  4. The side that first makes this strategy a serious threat, will create more weaknesses anywhere on the board, even if all the bishops are neutralised.
The titular bishop pair  can be quite difficult to assign roles to since neither bishop can efficiently be fianchettoed. However, when the king and queen are sitting on the extreme ends of the back rank opposed to each other, the strategy I have described here becomes much more obvious. See also my analysis of SP505 by clicking on the label (titular bishops).

Incredibly, no player in the database even up to 2000 rating, has seen this very obvious strategy. I wonder why? .....Hint.

Enjoy 960!