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Most popular pieces[Subject Thread] [Add Response]
George Duke wrote on Sun, Jan 15, 2017 08:14 PM UTC:

Designers' most popular piece is the early 17th century Centaur: Bishop+Knight. Glossing over its mythological roots, prissy 19th century started re-naming, in turn into the 20th century: Equerry, Chancellor, Minister, Archbishop as Duniho's piece article above documents.

Centaur. For board 8x10 and for the two Knight compounds, Carrera should be credited, Carrera, not grandmaster Bird or Grandmaster Capablanca. Even recently Grandmaster Seirawan, ignorant of history, emotes that apparently, after all, these fairy pieces are four hundred years old, whoa not original with him and Harper, and of course renaming them yet again. Medieval ingenuity had more commonsense than these degenerate times and modern Chess came about 500 years ago. Then the collective renaissance gemeinschaft richly-layered produces, midst art and science and empire-building Carrera's insight of logical Knight compounds with the separate Queen legs. Carrera's Centaur is invented by 1617, and in 1612 "The Tempest" has scene of chess-playing, Shakespeare's only play in the west hemisphere (Caribbean). [“O, brave new world that has such people in't!”]

The piece mix R, N, B, K, Q, P, Centaur, Champion(RN) is the only Chess form that accepts "new CV" just by re-arranging the initial array or altering Castling. As a result there are thirty or more separate inventors of slight variants in basic Carrera, counting deepened board 10x10. If you switch Coordinator and Long Leaper where they start in Ultima, it is still Ultima by Abbott. If you exchange Rococo Swapper and Immobilizer in the back rank, that is still Rococo by Howe and Aronson. But any little tweak Carrera-Bird-Capablanca (important earlier ones), then the designer claims a new CV. It has proved the most popular, Centaur especially getting wider play than Champion in CVs that at least change the other six pieces somewhat.