Actually I find king of the hill kind of pointless to be honest, the premise is dumb. I don't like the weird variants that involve random non-chess-like elements such as a bomb in your piece exploding and randomly killing other pieces around your piece, or other bizarre rules. Ones like crazyhouse and bughouse are OK because they mostly still follow normal chess and pieces still are normal once placed on the board. The placing is consistent. They also add some fun and some level of randomness that unlike regular chess don't immediately lose the game because you blundered one tactic. But these other variants are too confusing. And the fact that normal checkmate rules still apply in variants like king of the hill for example or 3 check chess, makes you have to split your mind between 2 totally unrelated objectives, which can be contradictory, like moving your king toward the center to win king of the hill which risks getting checkmated normally.
what is the worst chess variant?

#1 CHATURAJI IS USELESS????
its like the best variant, please try it out
the premise is fairly unique and simple: 4pc on a 8x8 board
#2 koth is fun because you get to slaughter all the bongclouders with center control and it is especially good for bullet because once you are ahead the win is faster ie less clock stuff
it makes bullet actually good
i think you are referring to atomic there and i do agree atomic is eh but it also has its own charms
but 960 is very dumb with atomic, yeah (by the self proclaimed "worst atomic 960 player in the world")
wow zh is like MORE theory based than normal chess and.... who likes a game where white just wins and as black if white plays perfect you have nothing but a fairly worse position
also, it is NOTHING like chess given how attack-ey it is
all the richness and beauty is gone for aet eich siiiix, checkmeeeeyt...
the placing is consistently biased to white and random attacks
and.... blundering tactics should be more common and more lethal for reasons above, ESPECIALLY as black
and any variant where saccing a knight for unobvious counterplay is decent is extremely stupid imo
also, if checkmate doesnt exist in koth or 3check; then the first becomes a bongcloudmania (especially if checks are removed its the worst game ever) and the second becomes like zh, except maybe even worse
and there is no endgame in zh
WAIT WHAT
you are promoting a variant without an endgame??????
so in summary, these two comments say that koth, 3check, and chaturaji are bad when theyre all amazing... and that zh is good despite it being only for a certain player

Atomic, 4 player and duck chess all of the three variants doesn't make sense
4pc does

yeah i also hate duck chess
whats even the point, just nerf literally every single defense for "haha duck go brrr"
and it is impossible to play with time constraints
you will timeout
and theres not enough time in a 5|0 to think about the placements and once you move your piece it prompts you to move the duck too
premoves dont exist
its a game meant to be played slow, but it also has no strategic depth

Progressive chess seems cool at first but then basically becomes stupid. I think white can force a mate by like move 5 regardless of black plays.

i swear, there are chess variants that make no sense and have no purpose of being there.
Things like "The Jungle" or Chatarunji (I think), are useless
on the other hand things like King of the Hill and Giveaway have a point
chess.com needs less and more basic variants that make sense lol
There are no "worst" variants; similarly in line with the notion that there are "no dumb questions".
Surely, that notion could be debated in some ways, just like my sentiment on "no 'worst' variants" can too be refuted in some specific way or other.
The way I see it, all variants were invented for a reason, and no one holds the universal rules as to what would qualify something as "the worst".
The worst, as in, the games that makes someone the most physically ill? The one that causes the deepest, most vile anger of all human emotions? The ones we play the most when we're most lonely? Most broken out? Most depressed? The hardest to play? The most boring? The easiest to finish? The most confusing? What's "the worst", exactly? Since, unless someone can show that I'm wrong, no chess variant can be all of these.
And then, even if a chess variant were all these to one person, they will not apply to yet the next.
Famous quote: "One's trash is another's treasure."
What "doesn't make sense" to you could be clear as a bell and the "most fun thing to have ever been invented" to another.

Progressive chess gets busted pretty quickly as mobility of long moves grows exponentially and quickly reaches pointless levels.
Antichess can be fun but it is very forcing, and very confusing to analyze, since your goal is to have zero mobility, but in order to do this, you need mobility. Take this position from a Fairy Stockfish game. This is mate in 32 for white after they feed everything to the king, promote their last pawn to a rook, and then win the rook vs king endgame by forcing the king into the corner and moving next to it, forcing it to capture (there are other options but that's what it decided to do). Surely in losing all of their pieces, black did not intend to facilitate this outcome, but that's what happened anyway. I'm not sure this makes it bad so much as difficult to understand.

I found a new worst variant.
Double queen chess.
You get two queens instead of a king and queen.
The objective is either to capture everything, or in some versions, capture all of your opponent's queens (yes, all, including promoted queens. There's no win by royal fork).
I'm not convinced that this variant has ever resulted in a win for either side despite multiple people claiming to know about it and a Triple S Games video on it. Endgames should pretty much be book draws every single time.

Progressive chess is beyond lunacy, like most variants. Both sides are in triple checkmate from every piece on move one following the game logic. A knight can get from any square to any other square within 6 moves, so by move 3, where black can move 6 times, the white king is automatically in checkmate already.
i swear, there are chess variants that make no sense and have no purpose of being there.
Things like "The Jungle" or Chatarunji (I think), are useless
on the other hand things like King of the Hill and Giveaway have a point
chess.com needs less and more basic variants that make sense lol