Proto Crazy

[crazymaharajah]

This is the last chapter. We found the answer as close as possible.

I have not been in Discord for 2.5 years - since the summer of 2017.

I found this correspondence - my friend from the UK informed me once about this discussion. We thought then that no references could be found. 

This is some kind of surreal story. And if you consider that the description is really a fact. 

In this discussion, one of the players reports that he was able to find in an old German book:

Granach 03.10.2019

Okei  i was just looking into this following book yesterday - there is a game mentioned called "Doppelschach" (german for Double Chess) and a few variants of that games seem to be described - the first one (paragraph on the picture) describes a game played with "normal" board and pieces "but the captured pieces" can be used in one's own "army" then....

unfortunatley it is written not even with latin alphabet but in an old font called "sütterlin" (commonly often known as "old-german"-writing) which makes it super-hard to read....

the book is from 1840 - and the author mentioned that the variant i was talking about was introduced 1821!!!

https://books.google.de/books?id=n64UAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

Google Books

Das schachspiel

 

Not sure about how similar it actually is to zh or even bug (since it can be played with bigger boards too) because i haven t read it further so far....

 

 

Okei 03.10.2019

I've seen this book and I thought doubles chess was something different but I need to look more closely. Thanks for the reminder.

 

Granach 03.10.2019

Your welcome :thumbsup:

 

Okei 03.10.2019

Pritchard says something about crazyhouse in 18xx but I don't know how he knew ...I will look more closely

 

Granach 03.10.2019

I will read it more closely and fully too...   (sometimes, haha, because as mentioned, it is more like decyphering than reading, not really fun, more like work ;-))

 

Okei 03.10.2019

I think I sent the link to Obi who is from Germany asking him to decipher some months back

But he didn't look yet

 

Granach 03.10.2019

Probably he has the same "not really fun" - issue with it, haha :wink:

 

Okei 03.10.2019

Pieces captured can be used in your own army... This is great... I really misunderstood

I thought it was just played on a double board

 

Granach 03.10.2019

It is so nicely written in an ooold style (seems all more about war than chess)..  the exact words are more like    ...   "the captured piece can be taken and be used (according to his abilities) in ones own army to defeat the enemy"     ....   with an addition of "following certain rules" referring to the "can be used in ones own army" but without any explanation what those "certain rules" might be...  maybe later in the text...

i just sent the PDF to my office and will print it out next week - i got curious now and like that i can handle it way better and make notes within the text etc...  i will let you know what i find...

haha..  just from "browsing" it quick...   there are several "4-player-chess-variants mentioned too that are called "Bierschach" ...  probably they played it exclusively in pubs :wink:

(Bierschach=beerchess)

 

Okei 03.10.2019

Lol cool... Yea I will try to dig this up on my computer also. My German is weak chess

 
Ed Trice 03.10.2019

Crazyhouse blitz games OTB are non-existent :slight_smile:

Kocbftn 03.10.2019

i wouldnt be surprised if most of the variants played with the orthochess set have been though of and played before than was recorded, they just never spread out of the club or meetup where they originated, people playing for fun will want to change up the game sometimes

 
Ed Trice 03.10.2019

I don't know what you mean.

Okei 03.10.2019

Not true gothic, as I was saying in #crazyhouse there was an OTB tournament in London in 1980 organised by GM Raymond Keene and won by Chandler, then an IM, now a GM. But yes, this is the only recorded event ever.

 
Daydreamer 03.10.2019

and what about atrophied vs john barthmelow

also recorded one

just for fun though

 
Ed Trice 03.10.2019

okei was that a blitz event? Any footage? That would be funny I would imagine :slight_smile:

 
Okei 03.10.2019

i don't know unfortunately

no footage but notation of some of the games

they were bad of course as no-one knew the game

 

He gives a fragment of evidence.






More fragments of correspondence provided to me by Granach:

Granach 10/10/2019

okei ...i started to read "Das Schachspiel", it is awesome. I am not into historical chess literature, so maybe it is not that amazing as it appears to me... but there isn t even a a-h,1-8 Notation, haha

White Pieces have Capital letters , black noncapitals and every square is numbered from 1-64... for example this would be the notation of a Kings Gambit accepted (B,b=Bauer=pawn):

1. B 53 37 b 13 29

2. B 54 38 b 29 38 :B

:notlikethis:

more about variants later, it is the Last Part of the book but now i want to read all, so interesting what was Up to Date theory 1840, haha...

okei not Sure If the Ping worked above, i am on mobile, stupid "Keyboard"/autocorrection

 

ProgramMMichael 10/10/2019

Now it did :thumbsup:

 

okei 10/10/2019

Ok cool. So the early edition of Pritchard said that some version of chess where captured men can be placed dates back at least as far as 1827 but then in the more recent edition of Pritchard this sentence was deleted along with other revisions. So not sure if deleted because he changed his mind and not enough evidence or because just left out.

 

Granach 10/10/2019

we will see, probably going to Finish this within the day, luckily i have nothing to do but waiting for some Phone calls...

 

Granach 10/10/2019

OK, next chapters are dealing with a Lot of variants with additional pieces with different move Options (Like Hawk, eleephant ect.. but a Lot more, one for example "Courier" chess has Just additional Bishops (Läufer in German, which means Runner, thats why Courier i guess) with restricted capabilieties (move is limeted to 2 squares) on various Boards Up to 10x10... i ll skip the Details for now... and skip to the "Doppelschachspiel"

...Board, pieces and their moves are the same (as in Standard chess) but the captured pieces can be used again "to beat the enemy (!, lol)" The author mentions also that this Variant First Had been describes in the third Volume of "Archiv der Spiele" (Archive of Games) which was published in 1821 :-o

They played it with one Set of chess pieces but drilled a little hole in the top to Tag them with black or White Marks... :open_mouth:

 

okei 10/10/2019

Oh wow

 

Granach 10/10/2019

oops but wait, now the additional rules... it is Not zh yet...

-the captured piece has to be Put in the Board right away or the Option ist gone for the whole game

oh wow... and the captured piece has to be Put on its starting Position (Bishop can choose if c1 or f1), If that is Not possible, See rule above... :-(

exception is the Q, can be Put on d1 or e1, If both Not possible, she stays Out of the Game as describes above...

 

okei 10/10/2019

Do you have a page no.

 

Granach 10/10/2019

it is on pages 80 and following in the book

 

okei 10/10/2019

Ok

I also found "Archiv der Spiele" in google books. Full name - "Archiv der Spiele oder fortlaufende Beschreibung aller Spiele der Vorwelt und Mitwelt"  Berlin, 1821

My German is average and I make out the words in this book. And still, I understood little, looking at the funny old rules. 

Granach:

"Page 38 is "Doppelschach" (as far as i can see there is nothing new there... the same rules/facts as mentioned in the other book, maybe just nice because this mention is a bit earlier!

 

The other interesting variants/games are mentioned in "Das Schachspiel" too.

 

Btw... i would translate "Doppelschach" as Doublechess - which is a bit tricky because nowadays some people call bughouse double chess, haha... i think the name comes from the double use as black and white for the pieces, has nothing to do with players . and tandem.chess somehow sounds as if two ppl were playing too or two boards are beeing played or something like that...

If you are interested i can translate passages or sum up chapters of other variants for you but not this year anymore, too much to do :-)

But "Doppelschach" is really the one and only early form of crazyhouse... i read about the other variants and they are more about introducing other pieces / like 4 bishops each in the Courier game iirc or changing boards to other sizes or 4-Player chess...."

It is important for us that he managed to find what something. And maybe one day he will give a more detailed comment. From this, we can understand that Crazyhouse was a collective invention.

You could even say that Crazyhouse invented chess Anonymous.

I think that we got to the border and then only the unknown time, we are fans like everyone else in the community.



 

What else can you find? It will be a search everywhere. And something like Earliest Occurrences of Chess Terms. 

I think that there are still people with some facts. I once wrote Fergus Duniho author chessvariants.com but he did not answer. Interestingly, in an interview for their site, David Pritchard says: 

"I live in a bungalow in a small wood some 60 kms south-west of London. Half my working life I spent flying (military/civil) and half in Intelligence (which tend to recruit game players). I am married to Elaine Sanders, an international woman chess master, who played for England (BCF) in four chess olympiads and was team captain in two of them (Medellin and Buenos Aires). Our five grandchildren are keen players and critics of board-games (but not chess!)... 

...Do you often play chess variants?

 

Only a few from time to time. I have played quite a lot of Hostage Chess recently."