Many different reasons:

1. The biggest one is probably that there is already so much interest and depth in regular chess. "Everyone" focuses on it, so that's what your friends know and where you can find competitions and community. This leads to a chicken-egg problem where it hard to kick it off. It's basically like another board game.

2. Some opening positions in Fischer chess are quite awkward: The pieces are on squares where it takes a while for them to come into proper play. This can make the opening phase quite unsatisfying to play. You need to make a lot of extra moves before you actually get into the interesting parts. It's not necessarily more "fun" to play this way than regular chess. There's also some positions which are much better for white (although it's on average more balanced I believe)

3. IMO, regular chess is easier for lower-rated players. The choice of openings don't matter so much (either way the game is decided by someone hanging a piece), and it's a lot easier to follow existing games. In Fischer chess it can be even harder to know "okay, what do I do?", while in regular chess there's both general principles and systems to follow. This means that most newer players keep being exposed to regular chess instead of Fischer chess.

> Wouldn't Fischer chess take the game to a whole new level, making it so that all the opening books are useless and the midgame requires much more improv?

Magnus Carlsen is promoting and advocating for Freestyle Chess (same game as Fischer chess, but with different name): https://www.freestyle-chess.com/. Maybe it'll take off.

Interesting, I read that link. It looks like they specifically call out Fischer chess: "all matches are played under Fischer-Random (Chess960) rules,"

So he really is just trying to build a tournament format around Fischer chess. That's pretty cool. I hope it takes off.

I don’t like it because you can get some starting position that’s not balanced, or that one of the players has memorized the openings for. So it feels much more luck based than regular chess, whereas luck is pretty much the antithesis of what chess is all about.

Luck is what makes it interesting for spectators though. :). Just like with other sports -- a lot of it is skill but there is always some luck involved.

Introducing: Balanced Fischer chess. Just randomly sample from the starting positions that are more balanced than regular chess.

It’s still annoying if the starting position is one that only one of the players is deeply familiar with. Too much luck factor. They should go the shogi route and get rid of draws if they want to improve chess so much.

I’ve thought about this quite a bit. I don’t think this possible. Draws happen when two players are very closely matched that the difference in their play is not large enough to lead to a definite outcome. Currently in chess, 2800 like Magnus would draw say 70% of the time against a 2600 and win the rest (making up numbers here). The only way to solve this problem, is if the game magnifies differences in capability and enables a certain side to win. Making a game that does this, is probably very hard and would not look anything like chess.

Any other solution would face the same issue that chess faces now. For example let us say, we imbalance the sides a bit more so that white has a more definitive advantage. That just means that players will alternate winning and you’ll have to play a lot of games before anything definitive happens. In a technical sense there may not be draws, but if it just alternates 1-0, 0-1 and so on, is it better than 0.5-0.5 and so?

Shogi allows early momentum to snowball (since a captured piece is your piece). This means white has a much more definitive advantage in Shogi as white has the tempo, so I don’t think Shogi will fix anything, it will just cause see-saws. In fact I think fixing this chess issue, is far harder than it looks, and may require coordination to move all chess players to a new tactical game that magnifies differences in playing capability far more than chess which already magnifies it quite a bit.

Good points yeah, I wasn't imagining shogi to be a game with early momentum for white since I don't play it but it make sense.

It still might - that is an ongoing debate at the top of the chess world.

For instance, Magnus Carlsen, the world number one by rating, is a fan of Fischer chess aka Chess960.

From the Wikipedia page on Chess960:

> Hence, on average, a Chess960 starting position is actually 18.2% more balanced than the standard starting position.

I'm also interested in the underlying distribution (not just the average). For each of the 960 starting positions, what is known about the first-player advantage? (I'm pretty sure these would just be estimates because a full solution is still infeasible.)

On average. Some starting positions are much less balanced than regular chess.

>> I'm also interested in the underlying distribution (not just the average).

> On average. Some starting positions are much less balanced than regular chess.

Yes, I expect variation, which I why I asked. :confused-face: At the risk of over-explaining, when I said "distribution" I meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_distribution

What does "much less" mean, quantitatively? For each position, what is the white-winning probability if you used e.g. Stockfish or some suitably adapted tool?

I would love to see e.g. a histogram where the x-axis buckets the estimated-advantage-to-white and the y-axis counts how many of the 960 starting positions fall into the bucket. What shape might it take? Lacking any particular insight, I would guess normal.

Doesn’t seem fair to have unequal starting points.

Because tradition is incredibly important.