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Comment by foknvp2er12 | Hacker News Reader

Would like to see Chess960 variant stats.

Classic chess are way too predictable and players who've managed to learn popular openings have an advantage. Chess960 fixes that.

And due to comparably low popularity of Chess960 I often play it with Stockfish. It has several difficulty levels which are a convenient tool for practice.

So it would be nice to include games with bots (checkbox?) on ChessMonitor as well.

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I'm aware of Chess960, but this will probably never be supported on ChessMonitor for three reasons: First, Chess960 basically tries to prevent players from preparing (by having a random starting position) which does not align well with providing statistics. Second, it would require major UI and storage changes on ChessMonitor (like adding an option to select the starting position to compare games). And third, Chess960 is simply not as popular amongst non-professional chess players.

How many combinations are there for Chess960?

I'm wondering whether people could also prepare for it if it became popular.

There's 960 of them. Hence, the name.

Slight nuance: the 960 figure includes the regular starting position, and there's some variation in different tournaments about what would happen if the classical starting position were selected. So, at least in some tournaments, it's actually Chess959. But I guess that has less of a ring to it.

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