Interesting that L.Aronian, H.Nakamura, and P.Svidler all finished in the bottom half of the standings; because each was the chess960 champion at one of the several chess960 tournaments held by the ChessTigers.de in Mainz Germany in the 2000's.

'chess9LX', with no embedded space to hurt Google/Bing searchability, seems like the best name overall.

@Michael Jones apparently some people are keen in forgetting Fischer's heritage as a whole because he had some nasty statements. Look at this Revealingknighty person, who unashamadly lies about me just because I stated that I disagree with wokeness, cancel culture and marxism.

@Revealingknighty you are making bogus statements, I wonder why. The fact that I detest marxism does not mean that I'm okay with other totalitarian ideologies, so you are deeply wrong, if not dishonest. Cancel culture has marxist origins, so it's fitting to speak about marxism when someone wants to censor Fischer. But nevertheless, I detest marxism. As about me being a fan of some of Fischer's ideas, please be intellectually honest for a change and do not put words into my mouth.

"why do I suspect you are watching a little too much Fox or reading too much Breitbart?"

Presumably because you are keen of making baseless claims about me. This would be a third baseless claim about me.

"Great record you guys have on refugees by the way."

What?

"I reckon Fischer would have fit right in, he would have loved it in hungary"

He actually lived in Hungary for a while. Do you want to say that Hungarians en bloc are as excentric as Fischer was? Or, to put it differently: what's your point?

If you want a name for it, just call it "random chess" - which describes perfectly what it actually is. The name Chess960 tells you nothing about what it is, Chess9LX has the same drawback plus the extra one of being a horrible mash-up of Hindo-Arabic and Roman numerals which has already been discussed. While attaching Fischer's name to it isn't compulsory, it's impossible to escape the fact that he invented it, however abhorrent some of his views were. If you want to "cancel" anything because it was developed by an unpleasant person, the first thing to go would be the Moon landings - only made possible with propulsion systems designed by Wernher von Braun, the Nazi engineer also responsible for the V-2 rocket which killed thousands of people.

Fgkdj: I agree this is great entertainment. It's interesting that the top guys are embracing it before the rest of us, hell it seems it's even got kasparov out of retirement (sort of)! That nf6!! move shows they starting to get the hang of it, the standard has advanced. I haven't played a tournament in years, but I'd love to give this a go. I just love the way it negates tedious opening prep, but rewards talent and understanding.

Lajosarpad I take it you are a fan of some of fischer's political views; I'm less keen (!)though he was a fantastic chess player. Interesting that you specify Marxist totalitarian views - are other forms of totalitarianism fine? A few buzzwords in there - why do I suspect you are watching a little too much Fox or reading too much Breitbart? Great record you guys have on refugees by the way. I reckon Fischer would have fit right in, he would have loved it in hungary

I'm not a fan of political correctness, wokeness, cancel culture or other marxist, totalitarian views. Fischer was a chess world champion and invented this variant of chess. It is perfectly logical and fitting to be very open about his heritage here, regardless of the fact that as a human being he said some very nasty things. The man was a genius even if he was excentric and mean around the end of his life. The fact that American chess players do not speak about the only official American chess world champion is obscure and strange to say the least. As a Hungarian I would be happy if there was a Hungarian chess world champion at any point in history, excentric or not.

You can see matches "weak player vs strong player" in many sports, and the best
prevail. The difference is that you can have draws in chess, so there would be some draws between players with a large Elo gap.

It's inevitable that chess960 is going to become much more popular based on some of the games played here. So's brilliant Nf6+ sacrifice after sacrificing a rook, with all the rest of his pieces on the back rank! What an original tactic and both GM commentators thought the move was a board relay error and were stunned when seeing it on the board. The last time I saw multiple commentators completely miss a concept was during the Anand-Gelfand world championship match.

Shankland had a nice queen sacrifice to mate Nakamura based on an unusual piece configuration and there was a game with Nakamura as black starting b3 e5 with a queen on a1, undefended pawn on e5, and it looked like a free pawn initially but black had a Bf6, queen moves, and Bb2 trapping a rook on c1.

The tactics in this variant are so creative compared to the stereotypical patterns we see in chess518. And it has the best elements of the regular chess, eg, Kasparov-So where he exchanges a beautiful knight for a terrible bishop and goes on to dominate which happened in a famous Fischer game.

Turok: Your statement proves that you do not understand elo.

Let me quote some figures.

When player A rated 2000 plays against player B rated 1800, the probability of A winning the game is 0.75, or, to be precise, it is 0.758036348. The probability that the game ends in a draw is 0.20, or, to be precise, 0.193765691.

When player A rated 2700 plays against player B rated 2500, the probability of A winning is – guess what - 0.758036348. The probability that the game ends in a draw is higher, it is 0.323746885. Why? Because they are better players. We know this because their rating tells us.

These figures differ according to the scales used to calculate elo ratings, but the differences are less than 1 per cent.

As for super GMs constantly playing the same club, the probability of A rated 2000 winning against B rated 1975 is 0.534862957, the probability of the game ending in a draw is 0.3. The probability of A rated 2800 winning against B rated 2775 (the ‘same club’) is 0.534862957 but the probability of the game ending in a draw is almost 0.6. The best players in the world are hard to beat! Now you tell me how it is possible that the ‘so-called super GM is overrated.’ The exact reverse is in fact true: the probability of Joe with a rating of 1400 and Carlsen with his rating of 2850 winning a game against an opponent with a rating that is 200 points lower is exactly the same, but in Carlsen’s case his opponent will still be a very strong GM.

There are completely different ways to calculate a player’s strength. Computer Aggregated Precision compares moves played in a game to the best computer moves. The best players in the world have the highest CAP scores. Is that because they are playing 'the same club'?

I agree with Mr Toad: 9LX is just dumb. It's either Roman or decimal numbers, not a mashup of both.

Fischer Random is a bit of a mouthful but at least credits the inventor.
Chess 960 is short and, as the reader knows, denotes the number of possible starting positions.
Chess 9LX perhaps sounds trendy but being a mix of Roman and decimal numerals is an abomination!
Why not just call it Chess CMLX? Rolls off the tongue beautifully! :)

If you name something after a famously-awful human being, or insist on always mentioning that person when you talk about the thing, you won't get sponsors and the thing won't flourish.

In the US nobody talks about him, but Europeans seem to be addicted to him. Probably because he was such an awful person, considering European history.

If Chess 960 isn't a good enough name, why would Chess 9LX be better? It takes even longer to pronounce. Perhaps they should consider the original reason why people don't talk about it or sponsor events. It does have a naming problem. But "Chess 960" was never part of the naming problem.

I have stated over and over again that the so-called super GM is overrated. The reason these GMs are ok playing in these tournaments is because they are only playing vs a select group of people. So IF one o rhyme loses in Random chess everybody can say well they lost to a super GM. Well that is why Id like to see these top GMs against lower GMs or even Master players without all of their opening lines of memorization and computer training and see how many of them would lose a game or two or more and let me tell you it would happen! For now all they ever do is exchange points amongst themselves. But Random chess created by Bobby was to really show the real skills of a chess player beyond the opening and even computer training of today.