> The random setup makes gaining an advantage through the memorization of openings impracticable; players instead must rely more on their skill and creativity over the board.
It's not just the 960 unique starting positions, but then each of those if given enough analysis probably has 2-4 optimal 1st moves for white, plus 3-5 optimal 1st move responses for black. That's roughly 5,760 - 19,200 optimal 1st move pairs, which is a lot to memorize to just get you to the 2nd move.
At the GM level, a traditional opening is anywhere from 5 - 15 moves long before you might see a non-trival expectation of deviating from explored lines, so memorizing 960 openings to any reasonable level of depth quickly becomes highly impractical.
I don't think so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess
> The random setup makes gaining an advantage through the memorization of openings impracticable; players instead must rely more on their skill and creativity over the board.
It's not just the 960 unique starting positions, but then each of those if given enough analysis probably has 2-4 optimal 1st moves for white, plus 3-5 optimal 1st move responses for black. That's roughly 5,760 - 19,200 optimal 1st move pairs, which is a lot to memorize to just get you to the 2nd move.
At the GM level, a traditional opening is anywhere from 5 - 15 moves long before you might see a non-trival expectation of deviating from explored lines, so memorizing 960 openings to any reasonable level of depth quickly becomes highly impractical.