Pre-Chess is Hochberg's topic in the second article through the Chess Cafe Archives link below.  There Hochberg writes, ''Lasker, Capablanca, and Fischer indicate an enduring and widespread disaffection with the game that has been handed down to us.'' Slide-Shuffle is one or our randomizers with comments by myself and Chatham in 2004-5. I think FRC has been done technically 20 different ways, half of them before Fischer, and not counting peewee forms of it allowing only 4-10 starting arrays like switching King and Queen. The latter have been even commoner. It's the same sort of scam they pull by springing 400-year-old Centaur(BN) and Champion(RN) every couple decades from Bird in 1870s to Capablanca in 1920s to Seirawan in these Aughts. Actually, Capa was sincere about that one, so the iron-fist conservatives quickly formed F.I.D.E. in 1924 precisely in order to scotch his and other innovation, like T. R. Dawson's.  They got Capablanca to shut up with the new set format. Now Chess Variants play into the reactionaries' hands by perpetuating the old tiny tired 64 squares, and CVPage long ago became just another sycophantish bastion of orthodoxy, unlike its auspicious start in 1990s. Thus from the Sublime to the Ridiculous.
 http://www.chesscafe.com/text/kibitz31.txt is Tim Harding at Chess Cafe in 1996 on bringing back free castling. They are all locatable in Archives of Chess Cafe, and the way to Burt Hochberg's (1932-2004) columns 1997-1998 among them is the same
http://www.chesscafe.com .  Just link the Chess Cafe Archives here, then through Hochberg and Perspectives. I happen to read both Harding and Hochberg from 1990s once a year or two. ChessCafe had its less inglorious -- and less censored -- years of creativity then too. Hochberg's first two columns are about different forms of chess, as though the subject matter is his very raison d'etre. And also why he only lasted the 12 interesting columns one year as CC columnist, it could be speculated.