Symmetrical Fischerandom Chess (SFRC)

Last Updated 12/12/04

Symmetrical Fischer Random Chess (SFRC) was created by FRCEC member Paul Grosemans, and first appeared in the net in SchemingMind in July 2004, thanks to the collaboration of Austin Lockwood, the site’s webmaster.

SFRC is an attempt to restrict the possible starting arrays to ones that have a degree of symmetry, yet maintain independence from the opening theory enjoyed by FRC players.

In SFRC, rooks always start on the a and h files, the king and queen always start on the d and e files (but may be transposed) and the two bishops are always on opposite colored squares.

Black and White start with the same position and castling and en-passant is allowed, just like in FRC.

An article by Paul and Austin on SFRC was also featured in the October 2004 issue of USCF’s Chess Life magazine.

The first SFRC game ever was played in SchemingMind between Paul and Austin. The game score for this historical games is included below:

[Event "M0165"]

[Site "FRCEC"]

[Date "2004.07.15"]

[Round "1"]

[White "Paul Grosemans"]

[Black "Austin Lockwood"]

[Result "1-0"]

[Annotator "Position ID: 708 RBBKQNNR"]

[BlackElo "1500"]

[FEN "rbbkqnnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RBBKQNNR w KQkq f1 0 1"]

[SetUp "1"]

[WhiteElo "1716"]

1.d4 Ne6 2.Nf3 a6 3.d5 Nc5 4.Ng3 d6 5.e4 Bg4 6.Qe2 Nf6 7.h3 Bxf3 8.Qxf3 Ba7 9.O-O O-O-O 10.c4 Kb8 11.a4 c6 12.b4 Ncd7 13.dxc6 bxc6 14.Be3 g5 15.b5 axb5 16.Bxa7+ Kxa7 17.axb5+ Kb6 18.Ra6+ Kc7 19.Ra7+ Kb6 20.Qa3 Ne5 21.Qa5+ Kc5 22.bxc6+ Kd4 23.Ne2+ Kxc4 24.Rc1+ Kb3 25.Rb7#

1-0

Since SFRC is a subset of FRC, all SFRC games in FRCEC are rated like any other FRC game.

You can play SFRC as a default chess variant in SchemingMind or you can play it in the E4EC correspondence chess server by requesting to play any of the valid SFRC positions (see position numbers below).

There are eight possible SFRC starting positions including the Orthodox Chess position. The other 7 symmetrical positions are:

1. RBNQKNBR (FRC Position #524)