The variant flavours of chess

The setting was Druids Head pub. The occasion was a club night. The twist was Fisher Random Chess.

What is Fisher Random Chess (a.k.a Chess960)?

According to chess folk lore, the mighty Bobby fisher, having crushed all competition was disenchanted with conventional chess. Specifically, the same old openings that seasoned players memorise, and for the most part continue to play year after year.

He instead opted to play and advocate a chess variant where the pieces on the back ranks start on unfamiliar squares, therefore producing a much spicier affair.

Sea food

Us chess heads rely on our favourite opening(s) to get us to a familiar, advantageous position in the middle game. But when are favorite pieces start the game in strange places (as they do in Fisher Random Chess), your tried and tested openings are of little use.

Fisher Random Chess can transform even the mightiest chess club, chess boss into a fish out of water. And on this occasion there was much flapping as we had to quickly get to grips with new world order, relying on our chess wits and off the cuff tactics more than ever.

As well as Fisher Random Chess, we also played two other variants, Kamikaze and Alice Chess. In our Kamikaze games, we again played with non-conventional arrangements of the back rank pieces. However, the state of affairs was made even more toxic by the suicidal the aim of the game; to win, you had to lose all of your cherished pieces.

Indulging my inner new age guru, I later told myself that Kamikaze chess embodied the spirit of something Bruce Lee (allegedly) once said:

Although, total annihilation of one’s chess pieces probably wasn't what Brucey had in mind when talking about hacking away.

Which brings me onto Alice Chess – My dear and sweet Alice Chess, where have you been my whole life? I'm sure the novelty will wear off soon enough, but today, I must say that Alice Chess is wonderfully strange and familiar in all the right ways.


My infatuation was obviously encouraged by the fact I won my first game; the mystique was further fuelled by the fact that this variant appeared to be a distant cousin of the fabled Star Trek Chess – possibly, it may have even inspired it.

 

In reality, our games didn't resemble anything like the picture above; we used only two boards. But it couldn't have been any more endearing as pieces teleported between each board during the course of the game. It was a (k)nightmare at first, but by the third game, I began to appreciate how some chess players are able to play blindfolded.

As much as I enjoyed my explorations into unfamiliar variant, territory, the purist in me couldn't help but view them as inferior. Beating my opp in a variant was sweet, but deep down the victory wasn't as satisfying as ‘real chess’.

I'll definitely be revisiting variants the future – and who knows, the occasional dabbling might even be sharpening my game in ways that are not immediately apparent.