Capablanca Chess

Capablanca Chess (or Capablanca's Chess) is a chess variant invented in the 1920s by former World Chess Champion José Raúl Capablanca. It incorporates two new pieces and is played on a 10×8 board. He believed that chess would be played out in a few decades (meaning games between grandmasters would always end in draws). This threat of "draw death" for chess was his main motivation for creating a more complex and richer version of the game.

The new pieces have properties that enrich the game. For example, the archbishop by itself can checkmate a lone king (king in a corner, archbishop placed diagonally with one square in between).

Capablanca proposed two opening setups for Capablanca Chess. His final revision placed the chancellor between the queen and queen's bishop; the archbishop between the king and king's bishop. He also experimented with 10×10 board sizes, where the pawns could move up to three squares on the initial move.

In his book The Adventure of Chess, Edward Lasker writes (p. 39):

...I played many test games with Capablanca, and they rarely lasted more than twenty or twenty-five moves. We tried boards of 10×10 squares and 10×8 squares, and we concluded that the latter was preferable because hand-to-hand fights start earlier on it.

Lasker was one of the few supporters. Hungarian grandmaster Géza Maróczy also played some games with Capablanca (who got the better of him). British champion William Winter thought that there were too many strong pieces, making the minor pieces less relevant.

The names for new pieces, archbishop and chancellor, were introduced by Capablanca himself. These names are still used in most modern variants of Capablanca Chess.

Capablanca was not the first person to add the chancellor and the archbishop to the normal chess set, though he is the most famous. Other attempts mostly differ only by the arrangement of pieces and the castling rules.

In 1617, Pietro Carrera published a book Il Gioco degli Scacchi, which contained a description of a chess variant played on 8×10 board. He placed new pieces between a rook and a knight. Chancellor was on the king's side and archbishop on the queen's side. Carrera used names champion instead of chancellor and centaur instead of archbishop. The game was largely forgotten after the death of the inventor.

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