A suggestion of new chess variant and one question about tournament ratings

And any news here, so far?

No, as I said there is no ETA on anything.

But Thibault managed to get rid of chess.js recently, which was a major blocker to variants being implemented. It is a big step, though many, many big steps still remain.

Bughouse sounds great, I've never tried it but it really seems to introduce a completely different dimension to the game. Too bad then if it can't be done here, for understandable reasons.

I really don't mean to offend anyone with this comment but in my view Capablanca chess (Carrera chess, dixit wikipedia?) would offer less in comparison for the amount of work required: after a while, we should see theory and patterns appear much in the same way as for regular chess, whereas to me variants such as 960 (my favourite) and, then, bughouse can make the game a lot less predictable and/or based on theory. I'd still try it, though: I'm sure it would be enjoyable, it's just that it may not introduce that much novelty considering the amount of work that seems to be required.

And sure, the second idea makes sense.

The purpose of Capablanca chess is not to escape theory or patterns. In fact, it's supposed to be the same game enriched with new pieces. Personally I think it's a good variant, although the OP aggressively exaggerated its popularity. I consider Omega chess (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Chess) to be an improved spiritual successor, and perhaps slightly more popular.

@moo - Omega chess, as well as Capa chess and Bird's chess, in fact, all came out of same raincoat, as they all in fact all originated from the 17th (!) century idea; the differences between those variants are mostly only in positioning the (then) newly introduces 2 pieces.

So, being it Capa or Omega chess or any of such variant, makes virtually no difference (even shifting the pieces in "960" style would be an interesting experiment!) - any of those would be, I strongly believe, warmly welcome among players. Only "partybreaker" here is the unfortunate fact that they are seemingly too hard to implement, which is kind of sad, but what to do?

#24: fair enough, and I guess even then theory would never go anywhere as deep as it does with regular chess (just how obvious is it that I'm too lazy to memorize anything?). What is the "OP"?

If we go down this road though, I agree going the extra mile with Omega chess would be a lot of fun (still dreaming, I know, and this is not to say developers on this site aren't working harder than on just about any other chess website... for free, that is).

#25: Bughoused 960ed Omega chess FTFW!!!

Well, I think the devs are doing a great job with the site. On lichess there is always new features and improvements being released, at quite a consistent rate. And most of this new stuff makes perfect sense if you ask me. Hopefully when great ideas are becoming a little more scarce big variants like this will be considered again. I can remember requesting live 960 on the chess.com forums and being promised "oh yes, they are working on it now. It will be released very soon" over and over and over. Chess.com doesn't give a shit about a minority of players who enjoy variants.. and they would rather blatantly lie about it then just plainly say that.

I think we can readily agree about Chess.com's or any similar commercial BS sites' "willingness" to listen to any of other user's suggestion; so just let's plainly forget about that option ("Chesscube" would probably even start calculating how many extra "cubit" money they could milk out of their users if they ever succeed to implement "Capa"!)

It would be interesting to find out how many possible combinations/permutations of positions would be possible with "Capa" (or "Omega") chess. 1500? 2000? More?

Statisticians, it's your turn...

By "positions" I mean, of course, starting positions.

I surely must misunderstand your question, because the number of starting positions of both the variants you mentioned is exactly 'One', just like in normal Chess.