Sam Trenholme wrote on Wed, Jun 20, 2007 06:21 PM UTC:
OK, I have been doing some thinking about Capablanca chess variants. As discussed before, there are some 126,000 possible Capablanca opening setups, where the bishops are on opposite colors, and where the queen is to the left of the queen. However, looking at all of the Capablanca opening setups which have actually been proposed, I observe that:
All of the opening setups have the king and a powerful (R+N,B+N, or Queen) piece in the center files
All of the proposed opening setups are symmetrical with the rooks, knights, and bishops
All of the proposed opening setups have the rooks either in the corners, or one file closer to the center than the corners.
As it turns out, there are only 72 possible Capablanca opening setups that follow all of the above rules. Of these 72 opening setups, I find that only 15 have been formally proposed as starting setups:
RANBQKBNMR Aberg
RMNMQKBNAR Carrera
RNBMQKABNR Bird
RNBAQKMBNR Capa 1 (Suffers from 1.Mh3 mating threat)
RNABQKBMNR Capa 2
RBQNKMNABR Grotesque
RBNMQKARBN Univers
RBQNKANMBR Landorean
RNBQKMABNR Embassy
RQNBAKBNMR Schoolbook
NRMBQKBARN Optimized
MRNBQKBNRA Paulovich 1 link
ARNBQKBNRM Paulovich 2 link
QRNBKABNRM Paulovich 3
RNMBQKBANR Nalls link
All of these, should I note, are perfectly playable, with the exception of Capa 1, and all of these have not had their openings explored nearly enough. Doing some slightly creative math, that leaves us with 56 possible starting setups. Here are some interesting ones, with names that I propose for them:
Now, if instead of a R+N and B+N piece, we add two colorbound Camel + Bishop (Sage) pieces, and have an 8x10 board, we have 36,000 total possible opening setups (Sages and Bishops on opposite colors, queen to the left of the king). Of those, all of 12 meet the requirements above:
- All of the opening setups have the king and a powerful (R+N,B+N, or Queen) piece in the center files
- All of the proposed opening setups are symmetrical with the rooks, knights, and bishops
- All of the proposed opening setups have the rooks either in the corners, or one file closer to the center than the corners.
As it turns out, there are only 72 possible Capablanca opening setups that follow all of the above rules. Of these 72 opening setups, I find that only 15 have been formally proposed as starting setups: All of these, should I note, are perfectly playable, with the exception of Capa 1, and all of these have not had their openings explored nearly enough. Doing some slightly creative math, that leaves us with 56 possible starting setups. Here are some interesting ones, with names that I propose for them: Here are three openings setups that are unplayable: Now, if instead of a R+N and B+N piece, we add two colorbound Camel + Bishop (Sage) pieces, and have an 8x10 board, we have 36,000 total possible opening setups (Sages and Bishops on opposite colors, queen to the left of the king). Of those, all of 12 meet the requirements above: Of these 12 setups, I find 1, 4, and 12 the most interesting.No, I'm not proposing a new variant. I first need to fully explore the opening in Schoolbook. :)