Baron Play Random
May 25
Complete chess was the name they gave to the short match that was recently held in the Dutch city Maastricht between the strongest Dutch player Loek van Wely and the most promising youngster Daniel Stellwagen. Conservatives might call it complete madness.
In my first column for ChessCafe.com, in July 1996, I wrote about The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants by D.B.Pritchard, an impressive reference work about hundreds of chess-related games. At the time I called them chess perversions, though many of these games were quite clever.
As Pritchard pointed out, different chess versions could be combined. In Billiards Chess the pieces are deflected at the edges of the board, which makes Bh6-a3 a possible move, as the bishop is deflected at f8. In Progressive Chess white makes one move, then black makes two moves, white makes three moves and so on. Serious tournaments of Billiards Progressive Chess have been held.
In Maastricht Kasparov's Advanced Chess was combined with a form of chess that resembles Fischer Random Chess, but in fact is much older.
As in Advanced Chess, Van Wely and Stellwagen could make use of computers. Databases, chess engines, tablebases, everything. In the first two games of the match they played orthodox advanced chess, if one can use that expression, but the next two games saw a further step towards complete madness: advanced random chess.
Though Fischer has added some special rules of his own, the concept of random chess is quite old. One of the first published games of random chess was played in 1851 in Baden-Baden by the Dutch Baron van der Hoeven and the German Baron von Heydebrand und der Lasa. The Germans have a saying that humanity starts with the baron and apparently shuffle chess started there too.
Van der Hoeven had borrowed the idea from his uncle Count Philip Julius van Zuylen van Nyevelt, who had invented shuffle chess in 1792. His version was used in the third and fourth game of the match between Van Wely and Stellwagen, with the difference of course that the Count had no computer assistence.
Personally I think that if I would be subjected to the torture of advanced random chess, I would leave everything to the computers, but Van Wely and Stellwagen have more self-confidence. Stellwagen had won the 'orthodox advanced chess' part of the match with 1½-½ and he made the same score in the random games. The most interesting random game was the first one, which was drawn.
Hindsight is easy, but you might say that Kasparov's abdication became predictable when in December 2004 he suddenly had some kind words to say about Fischer Random. Like a ruler who at the end of his reign wants to see his country go up in flames, a world champion wants to change the rules of chess. Think of Capablanca, who proposed to reverse the position of bishop and knight, or Botvinnik, who tried to make a computer program that would succeed him as the king of chess.
Both Kasparov's views on Fischer Random Chess, which originally appreared on the Russian ProChess website, and Fischer's reaction in an interview for Icelandic TV, can be found on the pages of www.chessbase.com.
Of course Kasparov wanted to make his own amendments to Fischer Random. The initial positions that were ‘poison to his eyes’ would have to be eliminated and only about 20 or 30 positions would stand the test of geometrical harmony. Each year one of these should be randomly chosen for use in tournaments, but only in that year. This way some opening preparation would still be possible, without the accumulated knowledge becoming a burden.
When Fischer was told about Kasparov's endorsement of his random chess, he was at first quite happy about it: “That's amazing. Did he say anything about me in prison? I guess he doesn't care about that.” The Icelandic TV anchorman told him that Kasparov had called it a tragedy.
But when Fischer was told about the alterations proposed by Kasparov, he was disappointed, as he considered these to ruin his original idea: “Oooooh! There's the catch. I knew it was too good to be true.”
It is rather interesting that Fischer originally liked the idea that Kasparov was in favor of random chess, even though he has called Kasparov a criminal cheater in the past. When the anchorman then said that Kasparov had called Fischer Random ‘entirely acceptable’ he seemed to hesitate and then turn back from the frightening prospect of reconciliation: “Well, I'm receiving a lot of mixed signals there. I don't like the sound… No, no, I don't trust him at all.”
But who knows? It has happened before that bitter rivals became friendly in later years and maybe random chess will be the medium through which these two pugnacious souls will meet.