Quote:
Originally Posted by vixticator
What is it, exactly?
OP provided the wikipedia link, but in summary... Pawns are placed on their usual squares. Pieces are placed on the back rank in a randomly determined arrangement (black pieces mirror their white counterparts), with the following constraints: 1. Bishops must be placed on opposite colored squares. 2. King must be between the two rooks, to allow for castling. This results in 960 possible starting positions, after that the rules are the same as regular chess. So basically if you don't want to bother with memorizing openings, you and your opponent will be equally in the dark from the starting position in Fischer Random (unless your very dedicated opponent has been studying the openings for each of the 960 start positions).
At first I thought the rules meant there would effectively be only 480 different starting positions, since a position and its mirror image are really the same position. But the castling rules break the symmetry since the white king ends up on c1 when castling to the left, and g1 when castling to the right.