Chess Variants/Capablanca Chess

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Starting position of Capablanca chess

Capablanca Chess is a variant played on a 10 by 8 board with two new pieces per player - the chancellor, which combines the powers of the rook and the knight, and the archbishop, which combines the powers of the bishop and the knight.

The basic idea of a 10 by 8 variant of chess with the chancellor and archbishop is nothing new. The earliest such variant that we know of dates back to 1617, when the Italian chess player Pietro Carrera published a book called Il Gioco degli Scacchi (The Game of Chess), which contained a description of a 10 by 8 variant with the chancellor and archbishop, created as a response to the limitations of chess opening theory at the time. Carrera's chess placed the archbishop between the queen's knight and queen's rook, and the chancellor between the king's knight and king's rook. He does not appear to have been concerned with structural weakness in the opening setup, since in Carerra's chess the pawn on the b-file, in front of the archbishop, is compltetely unprotected at game start.

Just over 250 years later, English player Henry Bird proposed his own 10 by 8 variant. This variant differed from Carrera's in the placement of the new pieces - the chancellor was placed between the queen and queen's bishop, and the archbishop between the kign and king's bishop.

Capablanca chess was created sometime in the 1920s by former World Chess Champion José Raúl Capablanca, from whom the variant gets its name. Capablanca feared that professional chess would eventually reach a state of draw death, meaning games between grandmasters would always end in draws. He looked to Bird's chess as a solution, and modified the opening setup. He proposed two opening setups - his final revision places the archbishop between the queen's knight and queen's bishop, and the chancellor between the king's knight and king's bishop.

One of the variant's most important supporters was German-American player Edward Lasker, who assisted in development of the rules. According to Lasker:

... I played many test games with Capablanca, and they rarely lasted more than twenty or twenty-five moves. We tried boards of 10×10 squares and 10×8 squares, and we concluded that the latter was preferable because hand-to-hand fights start earlier on it.

Capablanca chess adds two new pieces to the game - the chancellor and the archbishop.

• The chancellor combines the powers of the rook and the knight. It may slide horizontally or vertically like a rook, or jump like a knight, but not both in one move.
• The archbishop combines the powers of the bishop and the knight. It may slide diagonally like a bishop, or jump like a knight, but not both in one move.

The other pieces all retain their nornal moves.

When the king castles, he moves three squares towards the rook rather than two as in standard chess.

A pawn is allowed to promote to a chancellor or archbishop alongside the usual promotion options.

Capablanca chess has inspired a number of 10 by 8 variants that feature different opening setups. The most notable are:

• Gothic chess (2000) by Ed Trice - RNBQCKABNR
• Grotesque chess (2004) by Fergus Duniho - RBQNKCNABR
• Paulovich's chess (2004) by David Paulovich - CRNBAKBNRQ
• Ladorean chess (2005) by Bernhard U. Hermes - RBQNKANCBR
• Embassy chess (2005) by Kevin Hill - RNBQKCABNR
• Univers chess (2006) by Fergus Duniho - RBNCQKANBR
• Schoolbook chess (2006) by Sam Trenholme - RQNBAKBNCR

Another notable sub-variant of Capablanca chess is Capablanca random chess, created in 2005 by Reinhard Scharnagl, a user of the chess variant website The Chess Variant Pages, as part of a chess variant design competition for the website's tenth anniversary. The variant extends the random setup concept of Fischer Random Chess to Capablanca Chess, with the following restrictions for the setup:

• The bishops must start on opposite colour squares.
• The queen and archbishop must start on opposite colour squares.
• The king must start in between the two rooks to make castling possible.
• The starting position cannot be the same as that of Gothic chess. This is to avoid violating any patents, as Gothic chess is protected by a patent in the United States.

There are 12,118 possible starting positions in Capablanca random chess.