08 Nov 13
Originally posted by Fat LadyI was unaware of why it was called chess960, Fischer random sounds better and honours the great Fischer King.
As I'm sure you know, the "960" comes from how many possible starting positions there are.
Fischer didn't really invent the game from scratch, "Shuffle Chess" is centuries old. What Fischer did was to experiment with different Shuffle Chess set-ups and decide that the game was more playable if each side had a light square and a dark square bishop (i.e. n ...[text shortened]... square) and if some sort of castling was possible, so the king had to be between the two rooks.