
https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-problem-with-chess960

What is Chess960?

There is a comprehensive article on Chess960 on Wikipedia, which you can consult on all the details of this variant. Here I will only summarize some of the main points.

In 1996 former world chess champion Bobby Fischer announced, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a new variant of chess that became known as Fischer Random Chess. It employed the normal chess board and pieces, but the starting position of the pieces on the first rank was randomized, with the pawns being placed on the second ranks as in standard chess. The position of the pieces was reflected for both sides.

Fischer's proposal was itself a variant of Shuffle Chess, which was first played in the late 18th century. But it had some additional rules and restrictions: the bishops must be placed on opposite-colour squares, and the king must be placed on a square between the rooks. The game has some fairly complex castling rules, which you can study in the Wiki article.

The name Fischer Random Chess soon turned into Fischerrandom, and after he had introduced this variant into the Mainz Chess Classic in 1991 organiser Hans-Walter Schmitt changed it to Chess960, which reflects the number of different starting positions that are possible in the game. A few years before he died Bobby Fischer consulted me on a possible match against World Champion Viswanathan Anand. In our phone conversations, he referred to the game as "Fischer Random" or, more often, "New Chess".
