Check out Symmetric Chess, our featured variant for March, 2024.


[ Help | Earliest Comments | Latest Comments ]
[ List All Subjects of Discussion | Create New Subject of Discussion ]
[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]

Single Comment

Wide Chess. Chess with 2 types of non-colourbound elephants added on a 12x8 board using fast castling rules.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Apr 21, 2023 02:34 PM UTC in reply to Kevin Pacey from Wed Apr 19 10:30 PM:

The Interactive Diagram estimates the sWAAF stronger than a Bishop. I suppose this has to do with blocking of the slider move. The Bishop might appear to have many more moves as an Alfilrider, but the extra moves are all very distant moves. The larger the board, the more distant they are. And on a board that isn't empty, but 25% filled (as the Interactive Diagram uses for value estimation), those very distant moves will almost always be blocked. So it is much better to have the unblockable sWF steps of the sWAAF.

That doesn't explain the good performance in the mentioned end-game, though. The board there is so empty that the Bishop only rarely finds two pieces on its diagonal, so that blocking hardly occurs.