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George Duke wrote on Sat, May 26, 2018 12:08 AM UTC:

Thanks for the insight.  What is meant by the sentence with boldface that Fergus quotes is chiefly those CVs that have the exact same pieces as Carrera did by 1615 -- 10 pawns, 2R 2N 2B  Q K Marshall Cardinal.  It is odd that they get matched together in so many CVs one of each, instead of paired with itself and placed symmetrically in array the usual way, say like two Rooks, one on one side and one other side of K-Q pair.  And the way Janus does with paired Cardinal. And the way Gross does with pairs of each.  The latter two CVs follow more accepted over-all practice and naturally appealing aesthetics.

 The wording could have been better, and even now the clarification is not so easy because there are perhaps two hundred CVs inspired by Carrera.  All of the usages are impossible  to cast in a few sentences.  Ones on 8x10 with the exact personnel are Schoolbook, Gothic, Paulovich's, Ladorean, Embassy, Victorian, Grotesque, Univers offhandedly to name a few.  Winther at one time had more than ten additional in differing line-ups separately written up or board-displayed.  Now Winther has Capablanca Relocation Chess as essentially 144 unique starting line-ups of again the very same piece mix.  Trenholme and I counted 30 different inventors of Carrera-Capablanca form once.  Then Capablanca Random may have up to 1000 arrays same pieces.  And Carrera-Capablancas are special so that any new starting array or rules tweak is considered to be new Chess variant.

As well 10x10s like Grand have the like peculiarity of one RN and one BN along with normal King-Queen.  No automatic disparagement is intended, more like scepticism, just noting the unusual predilection in, well, sarcastic "can't have one without the other."  

By contrast, when wanting to use Nightrider, designer probably puts one on c1 and one on h1. Want Unicorn instead? Place them c1-h1 or maybe b1-i1. Leaper Gnu, put one a1/d1 and other j1/g1. But as a rule, Marshall on d1 somehow calls for not another corresponding Marshall g1, but that automatic companion piece Cardinal there instead.

Gilman is exception when using one RN as queen replacement.  Also 9x9 Maura's Modern uses one BN with K-Q befitting the nine spaces. And Foster's Chancellor had done the same with nine spaces using King, Queen and one Marshall.  So the quite a few examples of one only without the other can be looked at (favorably) in their own light, case by case.


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