Maybe 960 fixes it by making it all fresh and new. Gothic fixes it by making it much, much deeper. ;-)
Modern chess is rubbish.
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GrandPatzerDave wrote:
Maybe 960 fixes it by making it all fresh and new. Gothic fixes it by making it much, much deeper. ;-)
I almost find it hilarious how this article emerged just half an hour after your reply:
https://www.chess.com/article/view/no-castling-chess-kramnik-alphazero
Kram seems to be making a very valid point, so I'm quite eager to try castleless chess now.
Aside from referencing the title of Blur's 1993 album, I thought I'd just add "forget it, checkmate ends the game", but since a very notable GM stated it forever ago, I found myself short of words.
Still, I have to say that I feel disappointed that we're already in the computer era of chess. The meta has changed so much that I can only observe top-level games and truly enjoy them only after their ephemeral beauty is backed up by thoughtful yet understandable analysis by an engine-assisted human. All that pride in finding the best moves yourself has shifted to an OTB-only territory, because as long as anyone else would use engine-based help to get a competitive edge, there's no way to be satisfied based on the practical results of your fully human analysis only, and there's no way to enforce a code of honour pertaining any kind of engine usage (or lack thereof) for home preparation purposes, certainly not in the sports climate as we have it today.
What I'm underlining here is, anyone can be outprepared if they rely upon their necessarily flawed analytical skills only, and the overall development of chess progress means that the only thing which will enable modern top players to go beyond the memorisation cap is intuition... and even though hard work builds it, there's always gonna be someone who's more talented and therefore works faster... or I guess you mostly just get born with it, if you're Morphy or Capa. Either way, I'd like to challenge the notion that computers are the end of chess thought, but I can't. I can't find any "new thought" on chess, no one's becoming a true transitional figure among teachers like Steinitz and Nimzowitsch once were, and no one's even going past Silman and Smirnov anyhow. And that makes me beyond somber.