Rant: Why Isn't There a Serious Contender to the Staunton Chess Set Design?

Uniformity is a good thing I suppose, but it flies in the face of the old adage "Variety is the spice of life."

It seems to me a bit of a shame that we only have a single choice when it comes to a chess set design for serious play - the Staunton design. Why can't we have one or two other acceptable alternatives to the Staunton design? Of course, by "serious" I mean a design that would be agreeable for play to the majority of chess players - not some ridiculous "Simpson" or "Lord of the Rings" theme set.

So let me present some possible candidates (drawn from actual historical examples) for alternatives to the "officially" sanctioned and endorsed Staunton design.

The St. George Style:

The Northern Upright Style:

The English Barleycorn Style:

The French Regency Style:

And Two Different Calvert Styles (We call them "A" and "B")

And finally, maybe all we need is a "streamlined" Modern Staunton:

What do you think? Could you see yourself playing a serious (tournament?) game with any of these alternatives to the tried-and-true Staunton design? I could.

The Evolution of Chess - Chess Variants - Part One

One nice thing about being a rather weak amateur chess player is that there is no danger (at least in my lifetime) of chess becoming so easy and predictable as to not be worth playing. However, this may soon be a problem for chess professionals and chess computer programs, especially with the news that the game of checkers has been "solved" by a computer program called "Chinook". Will chess soon follow? Not likely, says computer scientist Jonathan Schaeffer:

Whereas checkers has a mere 500-billion-billion positions (5 followed by 20 zeroes), chess is though to have about a billion-trillion-trillion-trillion positions (1 followed by 45 zeroes).

"Given the effort required to solve checkers," Schaeffer reports, "chess will remain unsolved for a long time, barring the invention of new technology."

Well, I'm glad to hear that. Even so, I have always had an interest in chess variants since I first learned the game, going all the way back to the 1970's when I purchased the fascinating Dover Publications (they have a lot of great classic chess books available) volume "Guide to Fairy Chess" by Anthony Stewart Mackay Dickins.

Here, summarized from Chess-Poster.com are some of the more common suggestions for "improving" the game of chess:

• Modify (or abolish) the castling rules.


• Add new chess pieces that combine the movements of several pieces i.e. a piece that combines the moves of a rook and knight or a bishop and knight - or even a queen and knight.


• Change the initial starting positions of the chess pieces. This is one of the more popular proposals as found in Chess960 (also known as Fischer Random Chess).


• Changing the way pawns move (the ability to move three squares forward on the first move or to move one or two squares forward each turn) or the ways pawns can be promoted (promotion of pawns to minor pieces on reaching the seventh rank).


• Changing the size or layout of the chessboard (very often to accommodate the extra chess pieces as mentioned in the 2nd bullet).

In parts two and three, I'll take a look at two of the most popular (and intriguing) commercial variant chess available - Gothic Chess and Omega Chess.

In the meantime, if you have an interest in chess variants start with the excellent Wikipedia article on chess variants or visit the The Chess Variant Pages.

The Next Big Match - Fischer vs. Karpov !!!

Don't count on this ever really happening... but the report is that Fischer will play Gothic Chess against Karpov for $10 million. What is Gothic Chess? It is a chess variant with a 10x8 board and two new pieces! Check it out (sorry about the pun) at the official site www.gothicchess.com and at The Chess Variant Pages article "Gothic Chess - Ed Trice's improvement to Capabalanca's chess, played on a 10x8 board with the Archbishop and Chancellor as new pieces."

Mystery Chess Set

Yesterday I came across a picture of an English "Barleycorn" chess set. Suddenly, my memory was jogged. I seemed to recall a somewhat similar set that my grandmother once had. It was part of a collection of games she had brought from Scotland when she moved to America in the 1920's. Checking with my family it turns out that my brother had latched on to it - and he was kind enough to supply a picture of it which you can view above.

They are very inexpensive light wood pieces. They are not weighted and do not have felt bottoms. There was never a chess board (that we know of) that went with it.

Doing a little research, I have come across somewhat similar sets on the web. The House of Staunton calls them "Pre-Staunton Sets." Evidently this style was quite popular in Great Britain and Germany in the 19th and early 20th century before losing out to the more standard Staunton design. But what do I call it? An English Barleycorn? A French Regence? Or perhaps a St. George or a Calvert design?

Any comments would be appreciated...

My Early Days with Chess

I think I learned to play chess from a book in 5th grade. Each week Mrs. Sawyer would take the entire class to the school library and our assignment was to find a book to read and enjoy. I have no idea what the title of the book was or who wrote it – but it must have been a pretty good book for me to learn the rules of chess using only it to help.

I also remember getting my very own first chess book soon after - I think I was in the sixth grade at the time. My parents would let us pick out our own Christmas gifts at the large and distant department store 30 miles from our small home town. There I found “The Complete Chess Course" by Fred Reinfeld. Wow - over 700 pages of chess goodness.

Finding someone to play was my biggest problem. No one in my family played. It wasn’t until a few years later in about 8th or 9th grade that I learned my best friend knew how to play chess too! From then on we played when we could – mostly during lunch hour (and if we could sneak it in – even during class time). We even occasionally played chess over the telephone calling out our moves using descriptive notation. I think I won the majority of our games – my secret weapon being some of the advice good old Fred gave me in that huge tome of chess wisdom. I never did get more than half way through that book – there was just so much there!

I still remember to this day how in Orchestra class my friend and I set up a chess set (my treasured “Cardinal” folding magnetic chess set - which I still own to this day) on the chair between us so we could play. The music teacher had a terrible habit of lecturing nearly the whole class period instead of having us play our instruments. So why not take advantage of all this wasted time with a game of chess? Oh my god, did the sparks fly when he spied us blissfully playing chess and not at all paying attention to him! Just another example, I am sure, of how we all have suffered anguish and pain at one time or another for love of the game of chess!

Later in high school I met others kids who played chess and I would play during lunch hour with them too. I even played several teachers who had an interest in chess – even beating them occasionally. Sadly our school had no chess club – and the idea of even having a chess club never occurred to any of us! After high school I really had no one to play chess with. It wasn’t until my last two years of college that I found an opportunity to play chess again. But that’s a story for another post…