what if i told you that there were over 2 000 variants of chess think about that for a second
that's an insane number and the craziest thing is that new variants are still coming along over the
past few months vladimir kramnik who is a former world champion partnered up with deepmind deepmind
is an artificial intelligence company that was bought by google and they created alphazero right
there which is basically the strongest chess computer in the world i know some of you are
big fans of lila leela is also extremely strong and with alpha zero they began doing research
on creating new chess variants and trying to create some sort of meta in the chess world
about something like peace values they published a 92 page report which is in the description you
can click on it and read through it uh it's also here i've linked the chess.com article
danny wrench already did a video on it some of the variants that they played were a variant
called no castling this one vladimir kramnik has already talked about no castling before move 10
but those are boring let's jump down here self capture positions where you can capture your own
piece to win a game of like win a game of chess or make some sort of progress uh pawns sideways which
is an is a crazy one as well uh which means that your pawn can literally go from c7 to d7 rather
than only going forward torpedo and semi-torpedo which is when your pawn can go two squares in a
non-standard way and so on and so forth so let me give you a couple of examples what that looks like
and then maybe i'll even play a few games in this video with these variants i'm gonna go to the
chess.com variants page which is only available to select few as they try to you know write the code
this position looks like it's winning for black because black is about to promote two pawns
there's rook h1 coming and not to mention the move bishop f1 which disconnects the rook from guarding
the g1 square but it's white's move and this is torpedo chess which means that pawns can go two
squares whenever they want b4 to b6 and all of a sudden the pawn is threatening promotion the pawn
is going to promote on the next move right so this is kind of crazy uh that that b4 to b6 is possible
and the fact that you're threatening to promote now so move like rook h1 uh doesn't actually
create a threat of promotion anymore uh it's actually you who is threatening to promote and
obviously if this root comes back now to cover the b8 square maybe you play a move like d5 which
opens up this so it can drastically change the course of the game i'll give you another example
this is pawn one square which is one of the variants that they tried out now here for black a
good a good move is knight a5 normally this is not a good move because white gets to play b4 simply
forking the knights and yes you have this hitting the rook but i just move and you're going to lose
some sort of material but because this is a 110 so one pun one square pawn mode you can't go here and
so black i mean maybe you castle or unless you're combining it with no castling chess black is going
to go here and have a nice solid bind on your position here with the knights this one's a little
bit more boring another fascinating one this one is is just i mean this is an example of a sideways
pawn sideways in this position black can play the move knight takes f2 which just looks stupid i
mean just king takes f2 but but so the evaluation of this position is obviously better for white
but if you move this pawn sideways all of a sudden you have created an attack on the night
and discovered check on the king so knight e4 is now a double check and you're threatening to win
sorry my arrow game is bad you're threatening to win the bishop so you take and then you you move
your pawns sideways and go like this it's just mind-blowing and the second that you teleport
the pawn one square it's actually not better for white anymore white is completely lost the
evaluation of that position with the pawn on e7 is like minus four black is like completely winning
so that is some practical examples you know those are uh those are different positions where uh
this kind of possibility is applied this the these sort of variants um you get to see the the
power there uh another interesting study that was done uh was uh a piece value study so inherently
in classical chess a knight is apparently 3.05 a bishop is 3.33 the difference between the two is
0.28 gary caspara famously said that a bishop is 3.15 whereas bobby fischer had said that a bishop
is worth as much as 3.25 actually looks like uh bobby was more correct than gary was the gap is
even bigger than that it's 0.28 i'm actually going to jump into the variance pool here on chess.com
uh this is something available to folks in chess.com beta and i i have uh chess
gremlin here shout out to him sending me a three minute challenge for a torpedo game
this is gonna be crazy okay so in torpedo mode can i draw arrows i can draw arrows fascinating
so this is gonna be really interesting this in this mode a pawn can move two squares
at any given moment and it looks like he's i mean he's starting out with this opening and
the opening isn't isn't the most important thing in the world i guess you guys can't see my clock
so i'm going to adjust that i'm going to adjust that there we go that looks that looks good let
me shift this over a little bit okay great so you guys can see my clock this is as close to a gotham
chest stream experience as you're as you're gonna get this is normally how i am on twitch uh but i'm
but i'm trying to test these variants you please h5 all right i don't like that move i'm gonna put
my bishop here i'm pinning him but i wanna utilize the torpedo mode so my next move my next move is
gonna be that that's not a very good move in fact i actually think it just blunders upon
he has this one but oh and he plays h3 okay all right well that's just the free pawn that's i
don't think that's anything but that yeah you see you see this is the uh the game mode being
utilized here the pawns can go two squares um okay let me now pawns are very very valuable
in torpedo mode so i'm gonna take on f6 uh and then i'm gonna take on d5 and i'm doing that
just so this bishop stays out here i think he'll probably put his queen on that square next
attack it's it's got vision on this it's not really attacking this pawn i'm gonna play c4
because i have a long term plan potentially to play the move c6 so for example he goes here
which i really hope he does i'm gonna play c6 just to demonstrate the power of this game mode
um okay plays that i still have this but he takes so i'm i'm just gonna i'm gonna wait for him to
potentially play the move d6 i think he's gonna go there yeah okay he's creating some sort of
play on that side so i'll bring this bishop back um how do i bait him into playing the move d6
how do i do that maybe i'll just bring my queen up for now i'm just patiently waiting for the move d6
so i can play this also this can go to g5 actually that looks pretty nice too i'm gonna do that next
so to repeat oh and he's done it there we go so can he take me on pissant by the way no it looks
like he can't okay fascinating he can't take me on poisson i'm gonna go c4 to block his attack
and my next move is gonna be g3 to g5 really showing you here the power of the torpedo puns
these pawns completely can i take them on passant oh my gosh that's amazing so because because you
can move two and you stand side by side with my pawn i can take you oh my goodness this is like
the perfect example of torpedo mode wait but that means he can take me on busan i messed up
oh no he can take me on pissant oh that that is hilarious okay then let me go g3 to g5 i thought
i was winning there i thought i just forked him but it turns out that he can take me on poisson
wow wow wow okay so g3 g5 and now i think i'm just gonna come in with the queen the
good thing is that i'm locking down most of his pawn so his pawns actually can't move
which i think helps me a lot uh let me just make sure i'm not blending anything queen
here king here and i have some rookie seven coming uh also i have this move which probably forces him
to like move his queen somewhere uncomfortable like f5 and then when i check him i'm threatening
double infiltration with the rook he plays bishop f okay he plays this i'm gonna check him
uh f6 will be met with pawn takes yeah this looks like gg after rookie a so we win the game
uh but a tough one a very tough one and a lot of different motifs there uh that that we could have
that we could have uh utilized in potentially better or worse ways but that is how you play
torpedo truly a fascinating game let's be polite let's say good game sir uh and then uh
you know maybe he'll say hi youtube but thank you gremlin for the game that was really really
interesting now let's just bring it back here to the main board to to finish things off
wow that was weird what a weird game uh i guess we'll sign off on this question what is your
favorite mode uh of these nine introduced variants or just in general i'll tell you right now i had
a lot of fun with four player chess but i think that self capture is probably my my most interest
yeah the one i'm most interested in the one that's potentially my favorite and pawn sideways i think
pawn sideways is just absolutely fascinating maybe i'll do some more variants videos right
where i play and just like on variants against subscribers let me know what you guys think let
me know your favorite variant you made it this far two more videos are going to appear on that
site and if you're not yet a subscriber of the gotham chess youtube channel we're trying to
hit a hundred thousand so you know come on let's get on this rodeo i'll see you in the next video