Displacement chess

Displacement chess is a family of chess variants in which a few pieces are transposed in the initial standard chess position. The main goal of these variants is to negate players' knowledge of standard chess openings.^[1]

"D chess" redirects here. For "D-chess", see Transcendental Chess.

	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h
8									8
7									7
6									6
5									5
4									4
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h

A variation of displacement chess, where the queenside knight and kingside bishop have been swapped.

Variations

The following variations were tried in master or grandmaster tournaments:^[2]

• In Il Gioco degli scacchi, Pietro Carrera gives sample play at a handicap where the stronger player’s king and rook are transposed. He calls this handicap odds of the castled king based on a contemporary rule of free castling. Moreover, he considers it worth slightly less than two pawns when the king and king’s rook are transposed and worth slightly less than the knight when the king and queen’s rook are transposed.
• White's king and queen are transposed. This arrangement was tried in a correspondence tournament in 1935 with the participation of grandmaster Paul Keres. This creates a reverse symmetrical starting position like Chaturanga is played from. In Chaturanga, this is done so the players’ starting generals, having only diagonals, will be able to attack each other.
• The queen's knight is transposed with the king's bishop, so that both bishops are on the queenside and both knights are on the kingside, as shown in the diagram. This variant is sometimes called Mongredien chess, after Augustus Mongredien, the sponsor of a tournament held in London during 1868 under the auspices of the British Chess Association, in which several strong British players took part, including Joseph Henry Blackburne.^[3] According to David Pritchard, this is one of the most popular forms of displacement chess.
• The knights and bishops are transposed. This way a pawn move is necessary to free the edge square for the knight to develop to.
• The rooks and bishops are transposed. This array was suggested by J. R. Capablanca after his match with Emanuel Lasker, but did not become popular. This variant is also called Fianchetto chess.^[4]
• PP random chess: the kings remain on e1 and e8, one of the rooks must remain on the a- or h-file, and the bishops are placed on opposite-colored squares. Proposed in computer chess-playing client Chess4Net by Pavel Perminov.