On May 17, 7:45 pm, Quadibloc wrote:
On May 17, 5:02 pm, Rich Hutnik wrote:

I also believe you need a bridge between the chess world and the
variant world. I will post my thoughts here on this. if it merits
such.

Although my post was somewhat aimed at noting that variants have dim
prospects of being "the way" to revitalize Chess, I agree with this
thought about a bridge.

Let us suppose that young people playing Checkers who like it enough
not to turn to Chess, hearing of the dreaded three-move restriction
decide they do not wish to put up with such toils, and turn to the 10
by 10 board and Continental Checkers.

The issues faced by this is that people can't buy 10x10 boards
anywhere. Until there is mass adoption, it is hard to get that. The
Chess variant community would like it a lot. We just aren't there
yet.

It would seem to me that this would be the reason for the Checkers
governing body to start supporting the new game - so that if it did
supplant conventional Checkers in popularity, their organization would
continue to survive and prosper, instead of becoming irrelevant, and
replaced by another organization for people playing the new game.

They will support anything that the players will go for. I am working
with checkers now, and can tell you that is how they operate (at least
in North America).

As with Checkers, so with Chess. If Glinski Hexagonal Chess, or
Seirawan Chess, or Capablanca Chess, or anything else like that were,
on its own account, without any help from the USCF, to become so
popular as to be seen to be... an eventual *threat*... _then_ there
would be a good reason for the USCF to support the upstart, so that if
the new game took over, the organization would still survive and not
be supplanted.

My hope is that I can work with these organizations and get something
going. Considering IAGO, which I am involved with, supports ALL
abstract strategy games, if USCF or others won't support them, IAGO
will. What USCF would need to do is learn from the American Chess
Federation in how they have multiple games they support. They support
play as you choose and the 3 move restriction. Chess, however, has
greater issues that have been touched on here.

The issues with all these games is that they require new equipment.
Without this, you don't get it to go well. This is why Chess960 has
gotten some traction, as has Bughouse. Other games are in a Catch-22.

As long as a variant is insignificant, though, giving it any
encouragement would only create a threat where none exists.

So the people interested in a new game, a variant, have to do the hard
work of getting enough people interested on their own, without help
from the established structures for the old game. After one particular
variant stands head and shoulders above the rest, and is on the radar
screen, *then* it has a chance of being accepted into the fold.

What I suggest is a "roll your own" variant, where rules are treated
as mutators and let the best be selected. I am also an advocate of a
general Chess variants champion, treating variants as a unified
category unto itself.

- Rich