The original — and still the deepest game on the board.
The rules as codified by FIDE: standard starting position, castling, en passant, promotion, the fifty-move rule and threefold repetition.
After nineteen variants it is worth saying plainly what standard chess has that none of them do: roughly five hundred years of accumulated understanding. Every variant here is interesting because it removes some of that. Standard chess is interesting because of it.
Central squares let your pieces reach both wings. It is the first principle because it is the one everything else depends on.
Getting pieces off the back rank is not development. Putting them where they do something is.
When your rooks see each other, your opening is finished. It is a useful checkpoint.
The pawns decide which squares exist and which files will open. Everything else follows from them.
Every repeat is a free move for your opponent.
She gets chased, and each attack develops something of theirs.
The most common error at every level: responding to your own plan instead of their last move.
The variants above each isolate one skill. Standard chess is where they all have to work at once, against an opponent who has also practised. That is why it remains the deepest of them, and why the others are worth playing.
That is the argument for variants generally, and it is worth stating plainly: a variant removes part of chess so that what remains gets your full attention. Played casually they are a pleasant break. Played deliberately — naming the skill first, then going back to a standard game and finding the same idea — they are the most efficient training available, because you are practising one thing at a time instead of everything at once.
Everyone. And if you have been playing only standard chess, the variants above will improve it more than another opening book will.
You can play it right now on any device, in a browser, against a full engine — no download and no account. If you have never tried a variant before, give it three games rather than one: the first is spent learning the rules, and the second is where it starts being chess.
In the browser, against a real engine, no sign-up. One of twenty variants in the Grandmaster Gains Academy.
♔ Play Standard ChessThe rules as codified by FIDE: standard starting position, castling, en passant, promotion, the fifty-move rule and threefold repetition.
The rules take about two minutes. Everyone. And if you have been playing only standard chess, the variants above will improve it more than another opening book will.
Control the centre. Central squares let your pieces reach both wings. It is the first principle because it is the one everything else depends on.
Grandmaster Gains has Standard Chess playable in the browser against a full engine, free and with no sign-up, alongside nineteen other variants.
Everything, slowly. The variants above each isolate one skill. Standard chess is where they all have to work at once, against an opponent who has also practised. That is why it remains the deepest of them, and why the others are worth playing.
Moving the same piece repeatedly. Every repeat is a free move for your opponent.
Each variant isolates one skill and drills it harder than any exercise. The coach's guide to variants covers which one to use for what, or see the trainer classroom.