A variation of displacement chess, where the queenside
knight and kingside
bishop have been swapped.
Displacement chess is a family of
chess variants in which a few pieces are transposed in the initial standard
chess position. The main goal of these variants is to negate players' knowledge of standard
chess openings.[1]
The following variations were tried in master or
grandmaster tournaments:[2]
White's king and queen are transposed. This arrangement was tried in a correspondence tournament in 1935 with the participation of grandmaster
Paul Keres.
The
queen's knight is transposed with the
king's bishop, so that both bishops are on the
queenside and both knights are on the
kingside, as shown in the diagram. This variant is sometimes called Mongredien chess, after
Augustus Mongredien, the sponsor of a tournament held in London during 1868 under the auspices of the
British Chess Association, in which several strong British players took part, including
Joseph Henry Blackburne.[3] According to
David Pritchard, this is one of the most popular forms of displacement chess.
The knights and bishops are transposed. This way a pawn move is necessary to free the edge square for the knight to develop to.
The rooks and bishops are transposed. This array was suggested by
J. R. Capablanca after his match with
Emanuel Lasker, but did not become popular. This variant is also called Fianchetto chess.[4]
PP random chess: the kings remain on e1 and e8, one of the rooks must remain on the a- or h-file, and the bishops are placed on opposite-colored squares. Proposed in computer chess-playing client Chess4Net by Pavel Perminov.