Check out Atomic Chess, our featured variant for November, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
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).

Edit Form

Comment on the page Capablanca's chess

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.