Интервью

Miron: Dear Unbound, on behalf of the Battle Chess portal let me congratulate you on your win in the first online Battle Chess tournament! Please introduce yourself, if you don't mind.

Unbound: Thanks a lot for the congratulations! I am very glad to be a winner in a new chess game, even if there were only 32 people taking part in the first tournament. My name is not a secret at all, I'm Andrey Lukov. I am 35 years old now.

Miron: Andrey, will you tell us about yourself in a few words?

Unbound: I was born and grew up in Grozny, now I live in Krasnodar. I work as a programmer at a large enterprise in Krasnodar. I am married with two kids.

Miron: How did you begin playing chess?

Unbound: My dad taught me chess when I was six. I got really involved in playing chess when I was 14. I played in the Grozny chess club, got the first sports degree, took part in the city championship a couple of times. After I graduated I did not play for quite a long time. I got back to my hobby only three years ago. Now I play at several sites simultaneously.

Miron: How did you know about Battle Chess?

Unbound: I got to the Battle Chess portal accidentally - just by clicking on a banner. I really wondered what the Battle Chess was, I liked the idea and I wanted to try. The Fisher's idea of avoiding the predefined starting position underlies the whole concept of Battle Chess. It is not a secret that the opening phase theory of classical chess is really well developed in many directions and this is why the opening phase often turns into an absolutely non-creative competition of who remembers more combinations and seen more chess books and games. In Fischer's chess the opening position of first line figures is generated randomly (the pawns are positioned in the same way as in classical one). This is why the player has to make a new development plan every time. I played several Fischer's Chess games and I think that its disadvantage is that you often have to make a lot of unnecessary and unnatural moves for your pieces to make it to strong positions, where they easily get in the classical chess. I think that this is a deficiency of Fischer's Chess, though not very significant. Battle Chess, as I already said, is initially a second step in the fight against the opening theory - the starting position is not only predefined, but also not random now. This is where everyone can set the pieces up according to their own taste, to the best positions on their half of the board. This is the reason you can call Battle Chess the chess of the future, though I guess there will be a lot of opponents to it among the classical chess fans (I know for sure that there are a lot of people who oppose Fischer's Chess).

Miron: Do you think that Fischer's Chess or the Battle Chess can be a competitor to or a possible replacement for the classical chess game?

Unbound: I think that neither Fischer's chess, nor the Battle Chess can be a threat to the classical chess game, as a player has the same way of thinking and common rules in all three versions of the game - the only difference is in the setup. As for me - I will continue playing all kinds of chess.

Miron: Can you offer any recipes for the initial setup? Is there the 'philosopher's stone' of the initial setup in Battle Chess?

Unbound: Well, in Battle Chess the player, in fact, begins thinking even before the game begins, deciding where to put each piece in the beginning. This seems to be the key to the whole game. If the initial setup is a failure, the game can be lost in two to three moves. I think that the theory of the initial setup in Battle Chess is yet to be developed, but I have already devised some of the more evident rules for myself (I believe anybody who played Battle Chess before did the same). I will write about these rules in my article… …which is going to be published at the Battle Chess portal under Library - Articles. By the way, what do you think about the possibility for the players to use chess robots while playing?

Unbound: I don't think there is a way to prevent players from using chess robots in an online game. The only thing that is good about it is that everything else equal, (i.e. if both players use chess robots) the winner is the person who understands the game better, not the one whose computer is more powerful. The thing is that (at the moment!) the moves a chess robot suggests are not the absolute truth. Besides, many things depend on time that a player can give the robot to think. In five minutes it can give you one move on the first line, in an hour there will be another one and the third one will appear after a day of calculations. The robots are different too. Anyway, a person who only relies on the robot's analysis and doesn't really understand the positions will be inevitably deceived and eventually will lose to the stronger player.