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Ralph Betza in Japan: October 1997
<p>After examining my old email files, I can state that Ralph was playing Go in Tokyo at that time, but not Shogi. Even then he was 'semi-retired' from chess (and variants). Too bad he never had the chance to play in some sort of 'IRON MAN WORLD CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP' - involving equal numbers of games of FIDE Chess, Shogi, and Xiangqi. Perhaps www.chessvariants.org should arrange a triple-variant ladder tournament for those interested.
Ralph Betza: FIDE Master
<p>I believe that his title requires a previous FIDE rating of 2300 or more. Search the forgotten corners of the Web and you may still find a copy of the 1994 USCF ratings list, giving his national rating as 2330. Ralph was kind enough to play a few chess variant games with me by email in the late 1990s. Currently he is mostly invisible, apart from the odd post on the newsgroups by 'gnohmon'.
In accompanying Comment under Chaturanga here 11.May.02(Scroll down), Ralph Betza says, 'The average of my chess skill and my variant skill is far higher than anybody else--and I am not ashamed to claim that my average of the two skills is higher than the divine Parton or the superman Fischer...' Interesting. All the more unfortunate no word from Betza since about August 2003 precisely when Game Courier was coming aboard. Imagine play of Chess-Different-Armies at some Fischer level a la Betza.
May be you find something interesting on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chess or http://history.chess.free.fr/variety.htm
i have to give a speech on chess does anyone have any good websites on the histry of chess?
Charles Gilman does not describe Chaturanga promotion as it was played from yr. 600 for many centuries. It looks like Chat. Pawns stop and cannot move from the last rank on any one of three conditions: (1) if at e1 or d8 (2) if at d1 or e8 and Ferse is still in play (3) if at any other square-8 and one's paired same-array-filed pieces are on board. Shatranj, overlapping historically by yr. 700, primarily changes the very promotion rule to Ferse-only (what it is eventually called), eliminating those no-promotion cases. Makruk (What's New last week) preserves to present day that 'weak-Queen' ferz promotion. To players, no promotion at times after 6 steps brings to bear strategic considerations. It can mean waiting at rank 2 or 7; or moving to 1 or 8 and not promoting, but blocking or abetting checks, or even winning by forcing stalemate.
Why would it have to stuck permanently? What would happen if the appropriate piece was captured? I know of some more recent forms of Chess where a Pawn reaching the promotion rank stayed a Pawn until a back-rank was captured, allowing instant promotion. This was abandoned in favour of free promtion due to a general dislike of some of the odder results, e.g. a capture being disallowed because the captured piece would reappear aand put the King in check. Personally I don't find this much different from a capture being disallowed because the would-be captor is pinned.
I play Chaturanga again now in GC, but have not yet checked Murray's 'HOC' about this apparent ambiguity. 1000-1400 yrs. ago there were not so many programmers or lawyers to obsess every eventuality. Seriously, pieces are much more active than the one-step-only pawns, so it hardly comes up. I interpret that if you move Pawn to an 8th square, when ineligible to promote, it sits there and cannot move again.
I am confused about pawn promotion. It says 'A pawn may only promote on b8 to a knight, and only if a player has already lost a knight' ... What if the player has lost no Knight? can the pawn still more there? If so, what happens if a Knight is captured later? Thanks!
Murry's book is an excellent source of games though historically speaking it now appears out of date. At this moment the evidence supporting Shatranj & even Chinese chess as being older than Chatarunga is overwhelming. Even on this page the words 'what could be chess pieces' 'doubted by some' are used. All thats missing on this brilliant site is an history section. I'm sure your presentation would be much more interesting than some sites, where opinions are expressed rather than facts.
For historical research, may I recommend Murray's classic, 'A History of Chess'. It should be in print or available at a good library: http://www.chessvariants.com/books.html#bookmurray
needs more info for me 2 write my research paper for history. i am writing about the significance of the pieces. post more information on it. i will be back fri. to check it out.
<p>I am implementing this game for ChessV, but am unclear about the pawn promotion. It says that a pawn can only promote to a specific type, and only if a piece of that type has been captured. So what if no piece of that type has been captured? The pawn moves to that square and stays there forever? or stays there until a piece of that type is captured? or just disappears? or isn't even allowed to move to the eigth rank in the first place? And does this apply to the E1 and D8 squares?
<p>And I'm probably reaching here, but anyone know if there was a repetition rule?
im from new zealand yeah thats right and next rugby world cup well win woo hoo go the all blacks good site though
Kohtz's idea is that the same thing did happen a millenium earlier: that the original piece on the corners was what we now call a Dabbabah, and that it was joined and then replaced by the Rook.
The changes described by John Ayer are possible, but to me it suggests a need felt by the introducers of the modern Bishop and Queen to justify such radical changes. The change to what became the Bishop would seem more respectable if the same had happened to the Rook a millennium earlier. The growing and reshrinking of the board also has modern echoes in Courier.
Here is something I found posted in a Gnostic interpretation of chess and its history. The web source is http://www.goddesschess.com/chessays/calvognosis2.html . I have, as usual, corrected punctuation, spelling, capitalization, spacing, and such superficial matters:
<p>The German historian Johannes Kohtz (1843-1918) supposed that in the protochess the Rook was also a jumping figure, with a mobility limited to a third square. So the squares accessible to a Rook in h1 would be f1 and h3, and later in the game f3, d3, d1, b1, b3, b5, d5, f5, h5, h7, f7, d7 and b7. His theory makes a lot of sense (in spite of Murray's rejection after long arguments by post), because the three jumping pieces (Alfil, Knight, and Rook) represent a diagonal, hook-curved and rectilinear movement of the same range. It also expresses a perfect ranking order: The King and the Knight are the only pieces which can move to any of the 64 squares. The Firzan has half of the board, 32. The Rook half of that, 16 squares. And the Alfil, half of that, 8.
<p>The striking fact, unnoticed by Kohtz in his last work of 1917, is that a jumping Rook produces also the same magic sum of 260 in the Safadi or in the Mercury board. For instance: 57-6-43-24-40-27-54-9=260. The same happens in the previous and more widely known magic square of Mercury. The four corners of each quadrant of 4x4 in the magic board sum half of the constant, 130. This reinforcement of Kohtz's theory seems to me decisive.
<p>The marvellous Safadi board has, in all probability, predetermined the different movements and classes of pieces in protochess. However, once the Arabs acquired the game from the Persians, the Rook evolved into a long range piece, becoming the most powerful element of the chess army. This evolution can be explained logically as a necessity once the idea of checkmate has appeared, again according to Kohtz. In the first legend of Firdawsi, the game re-discovered by Buzurdjmir was as follows:
'The sage has invented a battlefield, in the midst (of which) the king takes up his station. To left and right of him the army is disposed, the foot-soldiers occupying the rank in front. At the king's side stands his sagacious counsellor advising him on the strategy to be carried out during the battle. In two directions the elephants are posted with their faces turned towards where the conflict is. Beyond them are stationed the war horses, on which are mounted two resourceful riders, and fighting alongside them on either hand to left and right are the turrets ready for the fray.'
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Note from John Ayer: 'turrets' is a definite mistranslation and anachronism.
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By the number of pieces it is easy to know that in this game the board was of 8x8 squares, though nothing is said about the rules of movement or the aim of the game. This gap is filled in the second Firdawsian chess legend about two half brothers Gau and Talhend (two typical Persian names), the latter being killed by the former during a civil war. To explain to the queen of 'Hend' who was the mother of both how her son came to die, the game of chess, which represented a battle, was invented. But it is a different game. The board is 10x10 and had perhaps a dividing line in the middle, as in today's Chinese chess, because the text says:
'This (the game) represents a trench and a battle field onto which armies had been marched. A hundred squares were marked out on the board for the manoeuvring of the troops and the kings' which is also a board of 10x10 cases, where is impossible to build a 'perfect Caissan magic square' like Safadi's. This time the movement of the pieces is described. There are three pieces jumping to a third square in diagonal, rectilinear or hook-curved direction. But there is a fourth piece which was the most powerful of all: 'None could oppose it, but it attacked everywhere in the field'.
<p>This piece must be the long-ranging Rook, the most powerful figure of the set. Again according to Kohtz's theory, instead of the previous jumping Rook, the long-ranging Rook was adopted as well in the 8x8 board as a necessity once a checkmate becomes the main goal of the game. Check and check-mate have already appeared, as the beautiful text explains:
<p>'If a player saw the king during the struggle he called out aloud, 'King, beware!' and the king then left his square, continuing to move until he was hemmed in. This occurred when every path was closed to the king by castle, horse, counsellor or the rest of the army. The king, gazing about in all directions, saw the army encircling him, water and trenches blocking his path and troops to left and right, before and behind. Exhausted by toil and thirst, the king is rendered helpless; that is the decree whch he receives from the revolving sky.'
<p>Where did the new idea came from? Since the moment when the fate of the king decides the victory in the game, the value of this piece increases enormously because of its 'divinization' and inviolability. In a way, chess has become a monotheistic game. The cultural atmosphere in ancient Persia fits well with the implicit idea. In contrast to Greece, were a king was only 'primus inter pares', basically equal in his human nature to his subordinates, a Persian 'Shahanshah' was worshiped almost as a God. 'The ruler possessed a special quality in the eyes of his subjects, which was called 'farn' or 'farr' in New Persian, 'farrah' in Middle Persian, 'xvarana' in Avestan. Originally meaning 'life force', 'activity' or 'splendour', it came to mean 'victory', 'fortune' and specially the royal fortune' (R. Frye.op.cit. p.8)
<p>There is a well known story in the biographies of Alexander the Great. At his beginning, he was a 'normal' Greek leader, but after conquering the Persian throne he warmed to the way Persian courtiers treated him as a God. He intended to receive the same 'proskinesis' from his countrymen, but Callisthenes refused to genuflect and was murdered in revenge by Alexander's hand. The 'agon' in chess and its voluntaristic message points basically to a Hellenistic background. But 'Shah-mat' in chess, an expression which has kept its Persian root in all languages during the chess evolution, may have its origin in the influences irradiating from Persian cultural ground.
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End of quotation. The description of the king perishing of exhaustion and thirst seems to me to be strongly influenced by the miserable fate of the Imam Husayn at Karbila. Note that, while 'Shah mat' does indeed mean 'The king is dead,' the king cannot actually be killed, and the Persian phrase is a corruption of 'Shah-i-mandaz,' 'The king is helpless.'
<p>Now, assuming this conjecture, we have a pre-chess on an eight-square board with king and ferz in the central files, flanked by alfil, knight, and dabbabah, with single-step pawns on the second rank. The conjecture assumes that check and checkmate had not appeared, so perhaps the battle was to the annihilation of one side. Does anyone consider this a reasonable conjecture? I will welcome any actual discussion, whether favorable or otherwise to the hypothesis.
<p>According to Murray's _History of Chess_, one early attempt to improve chaturanga, while still in India, was to change the alfil to a dabbabah.
Not the best for younger such as 9&10 year olds but informative
Further to the last comment the authentic 'Ashtapada', though unchequered, did have some patterning. The intersections of ranks 1/4/5/8 and files a/d/e/h were marked with an X.
The ancient forms of chess, Chaturanga and Shatranj used uncheckered boards.
does this game have black and white squares or are they all one color?
Wow! This page rocks!!! I've always wanted to play Chaturanga ever since I read about it in my encyclopedia, but my encyclopedia did not explain how the game was played. Thanks to this website, I not only know the rules of Chaturanga, but I also know that it can be played with a regular chessboard. I wish Chinese chess was like that, because a regular chessboard is the only one I have right now.
Chaturanga CD Rom is advertised at chesscentral.com.
is there a company that sells Chaturanga sets??
All right, I did not know that war elephants were used in China, nor do I yet know to what extent. They were used intermittently around the Mediterranean (Rome v Carthage might be an interesting Chess with Different Armies) but were hardly the norm there, and I suspect that this may also have been true in China. They were worthy enough of remark for the Chinese game to be named after them. In India they were familiar in both military and civilian life. The tale of the red and black flags is evocative enough but how much truth there is in it is another matter. There are plenty of legends of the origins of Chess, both prose and verse, and many of them are singularly unconvincing. Incidentally Hemp's comment uses an old-fashioned definition of the Orient-Occident divide. A century ago India and even the Middle East were described as Oriental because culture there was exotic to Europeans. However increasing ethnic awareness has led to humans in most of those parts being recognised as ethnically far closer to Europeans than to East Asians and therefore included as Occidentals. It is this modern divide that is used in the Oriental Variants index, which covers only variants from, or based on those from, East Asia. Another example is my describing the Knight as Occidental when contrasting it with its nearest Shogi and Xiang Qi equivalents; I am not neglecting India but including it.
not excellent because you not specified a free game. i think ocidental chess is better. i think the idea of promotion in chaturanga is nice, but not filosophic. i love the passage. the chess we play in ocident is perfect. like partenon.
Amazing work! I got all the information i needed from this sight
1. Elephants were indeed present in China at the time of invention of Chinese Chess (203BC), as were horsemen and chariots, as demonstrated in David Li's book The Origins of Chess (<a href='http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0963785222/104-4808093-237594
3?vi=glance'>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0963785222/104-4808093-237594
3?vi=glance</a>). For example, Sun Tzu's The Art of War mentions chariots and recommends that they be positioned at the sides for a real army, hence their positions in the game that mimicks a real army.
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As a side note, Murray's research is incomplete because he did not have proficiency in the Chinese language and did his best with documents of Indian origin.
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2. It is more likely that the Chinese had the pieces on the points in the tradition of Wei Qi (Go), also invented in China even earlier than Chinese Chess, and that their Indian discoverers, not knowing that the pieces belong on the points, decided to put them within the squares instead. It is equally likely that the Indian discoverers gave the game a name that they were more familiar with (Chaturanga, for example) since they did not understand the Chinese name for it (Xiang Qi, pronounced Shang chi).
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3. For the differentiated pieces in Chinese Chess, David Li's response: 'As noted in my book, proto-chess (the earliest form of chess of any kind, the forerunner of Xiangqi) was invented in 203 BCE by Han Xin, the commander-in-chief of Han, during the period of Chu-Han Conflict, where Chu was a border-state whose language was different from Han's. Incidentally, the color of Han's flag was red; that of Chu, black. Thus, in Xiangqi, the color of the two sides are red and black, with red considered the superior force.
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The reason for the slight differences in characters is, again, to convey the superiority of red pieces. Generally, as to the chariot, the red piece has 'man' as the radical, while the black piece has none -- this is to suggest that the black chariot is unmanned (the man/men occupying the chariot had fled); ditto for the horse (manned in red and unmanned in black). The word for the black pawn has, as one of its many meanings, dead, thereby conveying similar meanings of red's superiority.'
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The idea is to imply that the side of the army that the inventor was commanding was superior.
Sam Sloan's website shows a strong perference for a Chinese origin, but I find an Indian origin more likely. Horses and chariots were established in Indian armies by the time Chaturanga was invented, hence the name meaning an army that included them. Chariots as pieces were derived with the board from the older game of Ashtapada. Elephants must surely have been a piece in India first, and a feature added in India to a Chinese game would be unlikerly to find its way into the original. It is more plausible that the Chinese invented a game on square corners with undifferentiated pieces, discovered that the Indians had one on square centres with varied pieces, and adapted the Indian pieces for the Chinese board. An interesting way to combine ancient and modern would be what I term Recapitulative Chess: a 9rx8f Chaturanga variant allowing promotion (on the 9th rank) of Elephants to Bishops, Ferzes to Queens, and Pawns to any modern piece. The extra rank is required because Elephants cannot reach the 8th!
The page itself and the resource is just wonderful, as always. The explanation of Chaturanga is definitely useful and playable. The history may be in error; see <A HREF='http://www.samsloan.com/origin.htm'>http://www.samsloan.com/origin.htm</A> for a detailed discussion of the origin of chess. Hans, you may wish to include a link to this discussion and/or some of the content in your pages!
This is the only reference that I have seen to the rule that pawns must promote to the piece on whose square they promote, which I suspect may have been a variation to the usual rules. In fact the rule could be adapted as a minor variation to most kinds of chess, although it would not suit Shogi. My one reservation is the problem of the king's square, which I feel should be treated as its symmetric neighbour (counsellor or queen) for this purpose.
your history is an error.(even though, i do give you credit for trying!)
however, you said nothing about current chess that is played in tournaments and such. if you added this info., then you be improving greatly.
Nothing about chess
Nothing about chess
LOVED it thankyou thankyou thankyou. i want to start a board games club at my school, where people can play not just the ordinary games but also games like chaturanga and also ancient viking games i've been researching. your site was an awesome help. if it all works i'll DEFINITELY be teaching them all chaturanga. if anyone thinks of any other usual or rare games we should play please email the name, (and rules if you can ;))... [email protected] i love your site so much... i can't wait to teach my sister the original of all chess. wow.
IT DIDN'T GIVE ANY INFO I NEEDED ABOUT CHESS!!!!!!!
Wonderful research done here. Please keep up the good work. How could we be of help to you? I hope to start playing soon. Could you give me websites? I'm at [email protected].
According to David Pritchard, there is no single set of rules for Indian Chess. I will work on a web page describing the common ruleset.
I can nowhere find in your site the chess game called 'Indian Style Chess' which is played by many orthodox families especially in Delhi (India). The features different from the international style are: (1) Instead of castling, king moves 'horsefully' once in the game before check (once check given, loses privilege); (2) Kings & Queens not aligned (each king faces opp queen); (3) Pawn moving once forward only; (4) Promotion only on rank piece (rook, bishop, knight, queen) [not clear about exact rule re this]; (5) King cannot be left alone on board: must have at least a piece or two pawns i.e. if Black has only king & queen, then White cannot kill the queen. Please tell me where I can find the rules of Indian Style Chess? Please email me at [email protected] or [email protected]
The black pawn that moves to, let us say b8, will get promoted to a knight. But what if it moved diagonally to b8 from a7 (by capturing)? Does it become a rook or knight? Please email me at [email protected] or [email protected]
The real problem in determining which came first, Chaturanga or Xiangqi (or more likely, the ancestors of each) that when you come down to it, historically games have not been considered important enought to be frequently mentioned in the historical record. Last I knew, we had earlier clear mentions for Chaturanga than Xiangqi, but this may not mean very much -- both games could easily have been played for centuries without making their way into a surviving document.
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Of course, there is also the issue that with commerce between east and west, the two games could have 'co-evolved' with <em>neither</em> of them coming clearly before the other.
I like the information that was added in, but can we really prove that this game came before chinese chess?
Well, I had to go view the complainant's cited page, to give him his due, and it might appear that he, or at least someone, has a modest commercial interest in this issue. I might be more inclined to give his views some thought...especially since I once held them...but for his utter lack of politeness. The preponderance of the evidence in 2002 argues for the 2-handed game being first, possibly by centuries, but the question is surely not settled.
At first glance, I assumed that the 'rating' was of the person, not of the site.
Honestly! See Jean-Louis Cazaux's page on the relative ages of 2-handed
and 4-handed Chaturanga. It can be found at:
<ul>
<li><a href='http://www.chez.com/cazaux/chaturanga.htm'>http://www.chez.com/cazaux/chaturanga.htm</a>
</ul>
Neither Forbes nor Cullen are considered exactly up-to-date sources, you
know.
Murray's notion that 2-sided Chatrang predates the 4-sided Chaturanga is totally wrong. Where is some evidence? What about previous chess historian Prof Duncan Forbes proof for the priority of the 4-sided game? No mention of Stuart Cullen either. An appalling summary of Chaturanga that should be removed from the web! www.chaturanga.com
I have added more historical and background information in the form of a sidebar.
This page doesn't tell you one thing that would help you on any project. And also I have a very old encyclopeida which told me that when ever a pawn got to the end of the board it had to be promoted into a queen, which could only move one spot diagonally. Also you do not tell me how this connects to chiness chess in anyway. For example, how did the chiness come up with a cannon piece if it was based off of this game. Also many historyians have said that all types of chess were based off of chiness chess. In other words, you need more information and resource that would prove what you have just put down on your website.
I liked this page because it gave me good imformation on my school project and it was interesting too.
Provided the info I wanted, and more. Gracias.
No history.Bad for school kids.doesn't give you inside info.The info on SHogi(or whatever it is is good.Not Bad all up!
I think this is a great site. :-) I was interested at the remarkably direct connection across disparate cultures; and remember that chess is a game of intellect and skill...a really deep thought, eh?
i dont really like this site sorry!
If a reader says 'give me more history', then there should be a prominent paragraph with links to: history, shatranj, xiang qi, shogi. Skip if you've heard this story. When I was 14 years old or so, I used to go to the library every week to read some more of HJR Murray's thousand page history of chess, week after week until I finished. And when I finished, I knew that Chess was not just this one little game with one specific set of rules that I strived to master (and since I'm a national master and an FM, I guess you can say that I did so), no, Chess was not just one game with one set of rules, but rather Chess was a big thing, with billions and billious of games with a wide range of rules. Therefore, according to my own experience, one of the best ways to promote chess variants is to teach the history of chess. Chess variant people often like to make new rules more than they like to play the games; and often also they are less skillful at playing the games than they are at making the rules. Rarely one finds the Chess Variant inventor who is superhuman at chess but totally naive at variants (the two prime examples are Fischer and Capablanca). During my lifetime, the field of chess variants has advanced to an incredible degree. To a large extent I have been able to lead because the average of my chess skill and my variant skill is far higher than anybody else -- and I am not ashamed to claim that my average of the two skills is higher than the divine Parton or the superhuman Fischer -- and if you spread the word about chess history can you imagine what will happen in the future? Imagine an era when chessmasters routinely know about Shatranj and Shogi and Xiang Qi and the Colorbound Clobberers! In such a utopia, the very best ideas that you or I have had will be seen as mere fumblings in the dark by ignorant savages -- and the perception will be correct. Have you met any Grandmasters? Have you played? Do you truly understand how both their knowledge and their wisdom of Chess is far beyond what a mere mortal can hope to achieve? I have; as a mere master, I have what's needed to appreciate the greatness of grandmasters. Imagine an era when Grandmasters of Chess are also routinely Grandmasters of Chess Variants. ((Emanuel Lasker imagined it although he never proposed any variants.)) ... and the one thing you can do to facilitate this vision is to make it easier for people to learn about the history of Chess!
This site is o.k. but you should let people play chess on it!
Holly crap I've never been to a site with so much info on chess....i mean wow this is a really good site and im a huge chess fan
At least pople are agreeing that India had some form of chess from the earliest of times Thanx for the info.
Great! I have to try Chaturanga with my friends. Very interesting!
this is completely in error, chataranga is a four player game pre-dating crist, you dopes.
the page gives good information but when you show the games you sould be aloud to play a mini version of the game and see if it is intresting because from what i read i thought these games look fun and i would like to play a number of them before i download it. thanks for you time.
give more history?
it helped me with all my chess needs thanks!
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