Edit: Though good point to the parallel commenters, the knight shape is harder to differentiate and kind of throws me off. But maybe tweaks there.
Edit: Though good point to the parallel commenters, the knight shape is harder to differentiate and kind of throws me off. But maybe tweaks there.
If you ask an experienced player to use a weird piece set, you will only be introducing error and cognitive overhead. If you ask someone naive to the game to use the piece set, do they internalize how the pieces move more quickly and get over the impedance when they start to use a normal set?
Going at a tangent to your idea, maybe it is possible to construct a set that aids the performance of a naive player, but which degrades the performance of a more experienced opponent. Could that handicap be as great as a club player offering pawn odds against a naive opponent?
"Tournament chessboards" are my favourites, obviously.
Blindfolded chess for the better player ;)
Magnus Carlson, considered one of - if not the - best chess players of all time has a famous video of him playing three chess matches simultaneously, blindfolded, and winning all three.
Once you get to a certain point not only the movements but also entire gameplay strategies become internalized.
Even more impressive, one of the students asked Magnus if he could sign a chess board. Not only did Magnus sign an autograph, he literally annotated the entire game from memory. That is insane to me.