As you may know, a major tournament is going on right now, based on a variant of Fischer Random rules, sometimes misleadingly called “Freestyle.”  Subject to some constraints, the pieces are placed into the starting position randomly, so in Fischer Random chess opening preparation is useless.  You have to start thinking from move one.  This is a big advantage in a game where often the entire contest is absorbed into 20-30 moves of advance opening preparation, with little or no real sporting element appearing over the board.

Yet I don’t like Fischer Random, for a few hard to fix reasons:

1. Most of the time, at least prior to the endgame, I don’t understand what is going on.  Even with computer assistance.  I could put in five to ten minutes to study the position, and get a sense of the constraints, but as a spectator I don’t want to do that.  As a relatively high opportunity cost person, I am not going to do that.

1b. Classical chess sometimes generates positions where one does not really understand what is going on.  Then it is thrilling, precisely because it is occasional.  A perpetual “fog of war,” as we receive in Fischer Random, just isn’t that thrilling.  In the opening, for instance, I don’t even know if one player is attempting “a risky strategy.”  I am not sure the player knows either.  And I don’t feel that watching more Fischer Random would change that, as there are hundreds of different possible opening positions, mostly with different properties.

2. The younger players have a notable advantage, because they are better at calculating concrete variations and rely less on intuition.  (We already see this in the current results.)  Experience is simply worth much less in this very novel format.  For any one tournament, that is an interesting intrigue.  But over time it is a bore, as if only rookies and sophomores could win NBA titles.  In fact what spectators enjoy watching is Steph Curry going up against Lebron James, or the analogs in chess.  We want to see Magnus meet Fabiano again, not watch two eighteen-year-olds slug it out.  Sorry, Pragga!  You’ll have your day in the sun.

3. Fischer Random cuts off chess from the rest of its history.   That is otherwise a big advantage of chess over many other games and contests.  I like seeing that a player’s move is connected to say an idea from Tal in the early 1960s, or whatever.  I like “Oh, the Giuoco Piano is making a comeback at top levels,” or “today’s players are more willing to sacrifice the exchange than in the 1970s,” and so on.

4. I get frustrated seeing all those Kings sitting on F1, not able to castle in the traditional sense.  There are rules for castling in Fischer Random, but it feels more like pressing the “hyperspace” button in the old Space Invaders video game than anything else.  Who wants to see a Knight on C1 for twenty-five moves?  Not I.

5. I agree that current opening prep is insanely out of control.  I am fine with the remedy of 25-minutes per player Rapid games, or anything in that range, with increment of course.  Those contests are consistently exciting and they are not forced draws (you can play something weird against the Petroff, or to begin with) nor are they dominated by prep.

6. If you don’t want to watch Rapid, I would rather randomize the first few opening moves than the placement of the pieces.  If you don’t control the first three (seven? ten?) first moves, once again opening prep becomes much tougher.  So what if some games start with 1. b4 b6?  The resulting position is still playable for both sides and furthermore it still makes intuitive sense to chess spectators.  Of course the computers would restrict this randomization to sequences that still are playable for both sides.  The very exact nature of current chess opening prep in fact implies you need only a very small change in the rules to disrupt it, not the kind of huge change represented by Fischer Random.

That all said, I am all for experimentation, it’s just that some of them should be strangled in the crib.