Displacement 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

Displacement chess. One of several variations.

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.

Variations

The following variations were tried in master or grandmaster tournaments:

• White's king and queen are transposed. This arrangement was tried in a correspondence tournament in 1935 with the participation of Keres, a chess grandmaster.
• Queen's knight is transposed with king's bishop, so that both bishops are on the queen side and both knights are on the king's side, as shown in the diagram at right. 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 chess players took part, including Blackburne. According to Pritchard, this is one of the most popular forms of displacement chess.
• The knights and bishops are transposed.
• The rooks and bishops are transposed. This array was suggested by Capablanca after his match with Lasker, but did not become popular. This variant is also called Fianchetto chess.
• PP Random Chess: king remains on e1(e8) one of the rooks must remain on the 'a' or 'h' file, the bishops are placed on opposite-colored squares. Proposed in computer chess playing client Chess4Net by Pavel Perminov.