Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
I'm wondering if the following potential change in the rules of chess would make sense, or if it has hidden pitfalls.
Suppose one player (say Black) has a piece (say a bishop) that's pinned because if it moved, it would discover a check to Black's king. And suppose it's White's turn.
Then I propose that it should be legal for White to put his own king in "check" from that bishop, since for the moment that bishop cannot really theoretically take White's king.
-->>>General proposed rule: One player should be allowed to move so as to put their king in "check" from an opposing piece *if* that piece is -- for the moment -- forbidden by the rules of chess to move to the square that king is on.
(Which of doesn't doesn't mean it would necessarily be a good idea to do so.)
In earlier versions of chess, the objective was to capture the opponsing king - so avoiding putting your own king in check was not a game rule, just an essential strategy. Still, in such a case, moving your own king into a threatened square of a pinned bishop would not be safe, since the bishop would take your king, rendering the exposure of its own king moot. (We can see this dynamic in chess currently - if, say, a bishop is pinned in front of a rook, it is unsafe to move a rook or queen into a square threatened by the bishop.) Your proposal can also make increase the complexity of determining whether a square is threatened or not. Suppose the pinned black bishop is itself pinning a white rook - would the black king be permitted to move into the path of the rook? Theoretically, it should not be able to do so, because even though the rook is pinned by the bishop, the bishop is not available to do the pinning. However, if the king would move out of the pin, this would free the bishop to pin the rook. While unlikely, it's possible to involve a long Rube-Goldberg chain of pieces each pinning each other, and determining it would be impossible to determine whether a particular move is legal or not without examining the positions of many other pieces. Still, it would make for an interesting variant. (In much the same way that modern chess with its stalemate rules makes the endgame subtly more interesting) -- Mark D. Niemiec <mniemiec@interserv.com>