The history and well-studied lines add a lot to the game though, both for players and for spectators. 960 can be fun but it's not a replacement for classical chess, it's a different game altogether. To stick to the poker comparison (which the article barely makes), it's like saying that the fix for NLH bots and solvers is to switch to PLO - you haven't fixed anything, you've just decided to play a different game.
The solution is to generate a 960 configuration every year on January 1st, and use it throughout the year. You get to have a new configuration to study, figure out and memorize opening lines, for an entire year.
It's more or less what StarCraft II has been doing throughout its entire existence. Every couple months (more like years these days) there's a balance patch that slightly tweaks some units' stats, like build time, cost, damage output, tags (e.g. light, armored, which makes it good/bad vs something else) etc. It doesn't have a huge impact on the casual player audience, but it's enough to stir up the metagame at GM/pro level, and ensure pros continue to devise new strategies (and counters).
What I mean is that the gap between someone who has studied the new opening vs someone who hasn't studied would be huge so players have a much stronger incentive to prepare. And with an engine the new theory comes out immediately, it's not like you're waiting for humans to develop it.
Imagine a match in classical chess between a 2600-rated plyaer who has spent time preparing their classical openings and a 2800 rated player who hasn't prepared at all - the 2800 player will still have a large edge. Now imagine the same scenario for a 960 game where the lower-rated player has spent 4 days evaluating the opening with an engine and the high-rated player hasn't - in this scenario the advantage from the engine prep is much bigger. The mix of novelty + opportunity to prepare is such that from a game theory perspective the whole thing becomes prepare-or-lose if their overall chess strength is reasonably close otherwise.
Mmm, that makes sense. I think it's easy for people (myself) who've only played at a very amateur (casual IRL games and sub 1200 online) level to make assumptions about how chess must be for high ranked players. Realistically if they're able to decide to resign after only a handful of moves and no captures, we're playing a pretty different game conceptually, even if the rules and setup are identical.
It's nice to think of high ranked players playing chess the way my friends and I do: distracted, stoned, and just sort of improvising, but I'm realizing now that for good players it's waaay more about the prep and theory than just playing by "feel".
It's interesting, just a few hours ago, I used the chess openings example to explain why some Magic the Gathering players dislike the now very prevalent practice of "netdecking" (using someone else's list of cards, while in theory, the game started out as one where you compose your own list).
Yeah but the fix doesn't come for free, you're giving up a lot in exchange. Which is why 960 isn't a replacement for classicial, it's another chess variant that people play in addition to classical chess.
