The Chess Variant Forum

I'm not aware of any international committee which governs chess variant games, nor oversees variant chess-game tournaments. So I decided to collect some information on recent and active tournaments, and who is regarded as our current World Champions. The table below is just a start, and I presume there is much more that can be added. If you have any information to add please share!

I'm the American champion of Sittuyin according to the online tournament I set up which I won.

So cool! It's good to know that the founder of this forum has credibility, and can win games!

I see that it's played on an 8x8 board. Are you aware if any engines can play it? The reason I like to add that information is so we know if it can be played in an online format, with slow time-control, and know for sure the player(s) aren't using engines.

Also, what year was the tournament? I can go back a few years in this summary. I'll add details to the chart within a few days.

I think you need to include the size of the playing population and the number of players in the event that determines the "world championship." If there are fewer than 10000 players, I would not think this represents a title with a "world" prefix. If there are fewer than 2000 then I don't think you can claim to be the champion of any country. If less than 500 then you are talking about, at best, a "state" or "province" championship. And if less than 100, I would not think even the title of a City Champion applies.

I think Sjaak II features Sittuyin as one of the preconfigured variants.

Thanks HGMuller. I currently don't see that in one list I see of variants supported by Sjaak II (link below). Can anyone confirm it?

http://www.eglebbk.dds.nl/program/chess-index.html

Well in the year 2000, the first year of Gothic Chess, we had (I think) 400 people to play for the "US Championship" but most of the people who made the finals were from Philadelphia. There were players from Washington, D.C., a few places in New Jersey, two came from New York city. It was mixed swiss elimination (online) to get to the final group, then a double round robin over-the-board. In total there were 20 rounds.

While that was probably a larger playing population than some of these variants, I had no illusions about being the "United States Champion."

First, congratulations to GothicChessInventor for winning the U.S. Championship in 2000 of Gothic Chess. I'm sure there was a lot of spectacular play in those competitions.

Also, congratulations to McGoohan for the 2017 tournament win in Knights And Queens! Another superb performance which is very noteworthy in the variant world!

And thanks everyone for the other comments - this is awesome! It's exactly the type of information I was hoping to collect and gather in one place. As McGoohan says, I hope this list will help chess variants to become more popular.

Current and new players can use this as a resource to see who are the stars, even if the competitions are still at an amateur level. It can also serve as a resource for players who want to consider competing in a new discipline - maybe trying a game with more pieces, or a larger board.

The information provided by everyone is excellent. It's not too much to summarize in a single list. I'll keep working on it - just let me have a few days between each update. If it does become too cumbersome due to length then I might cull or filter out some info if necessary (based on some criteria). But we're not anywhere near that point yet. Obviously variant chess is not as popular as the classical game of chess by any measure. This is the place where people can learn about it and see if it grows!

Remember, the game of baseball was once played on a poorly marked field with little or no audience, and some games did not even have a home run fence. There was no official "ball" and pitchers would arrive at games with their own hand-crafted inventions. But somewhere, over time, the ball and rules of the game became formalized. Information was spread in newspapers, on the radio and by trading cards. Eventually the stars of the game were born. I believe variant chess will grow in a similar fashion. We just have a different medium than radio and playing cards!:)

That's an interesting point of view, but the way to be a Champion is to play games and win. Using the baseball metaphor, some players of the early 20th century are long forgotten. They were superseded by better and more skilled players. It's not my goal to discern "best" possible play for any particular game, and compare players with theoretical play. One of my objectives is to give attention to players who play games and win. That's the pinnacle of game-playing.

Indeed, the Gothic tournaments were great. The last Battle of the Goths event is already quite some time ago, but as far as I know there has been no development of engines that could play Gothic Chess at all, since then. Bihasa won the last tourney convincing. (But of course only WinBoard-compatible engines could compete, so Gothic Vortex wasn't there.)

BTW, I am in possession of the source code of TSCP-Gothic. For the "Battle of the Goths" events, which also used other starting positions (to get more game diversity), I had hacked TSCP-G, overwriting the startup FEN with a hex editor. (It did not support the WinBoard command for setting up a position.)