Chessville - Rainbow Chess - by GM András Adorján

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Rainbow Chess
by GM András Adorján

NO!

Rainbow
on the chessboard!

The rainbow is an eternal symbol of hope for mankind. By introducing Rainbow Chess we do hope to enrich our beloved royal game with wonderful colours without violating its noble spirit. We do not want to destroy the framework of the ancient game, what we want is change and progress within this framework.

I showed a set of Rainbow Chess to Geurt Gijssen in '94, who was a chief arbiter in many top events (including some of the Kasparov-Karpov matches). He went through the FIDE Regulation and found the following requirement concerning the pieces: they should clearly differ from each other, while one of the camps must be brighter and the other darker. The Rainbow Chess Set meets all these requirements, he said, and added: if the opponents would agree, this set could be used even in a World Championship level tomorrow.

Well, it's not going to happen so soon, but it is likely that FIDE will officially recognize Rainbow Chess in the near future.

Some Sentences about
Rainbow Chess

The officers behind the ranks of 'traditional' Black and White pawns have their own colours. Kings are red, queens are purple, bishops are blue, knights are yellow, and rooks are green. And, as the 'Black' pieces are the darker shades of the 'White' ones, there can be no problem with telling them apart! You can easily get accustomed to the 'orgy' of colours, which is really strange at first sight.

According to inventor Pál Suvada (1912-1995), his idea, which was patented in the USA more than 30 years ago, can have numerous advantages (his hypotheses are based on the result of earlier research):

the human eye perceives and stores colours much quicker than any form or sign;
therefore, quite a bit of precious thinking time can be saved for real professional problems;
as the 'private' colours of pieces are a useful addition to the ways of identification we have known so far, we can presume that the number of blunders and grave errors would go down, too;
it is especially beginners (mostly children) who learn much more easily and eagerly with the help of colours;
it would make our game far more popular, first of all by facilitating the broadcasting of chess on TV;
the appearance of the colours of the rainbow on the chessboard can also increase the aesthetic pleasure of the spectators.

Unlike other reform attempts, Rainbow Chess does not change anything apart from adding new colours: the start position, the way the pieces move, the size of the board and all the other archaic conventions of the game remain the same!

The idea - like the Sleeping Beauty - awoke from its 30 years of sleep on 22 July, 1994, when the world premier took place in Budapest, Hungary, as a part of Béla Papp Memorial. It was a rapid subject tournament. It was a lot of fun, too...

So the ball started to roll...

Since that we've organized a large number of 'speedy' tournaments from 30' down to 5' each.

Only this year five events took place (so far), among them the First Hungarian Speedy Rainbow Chess Ch. (20' each, 112 participants) and the I.Rainbow Blitz Championship of Budapest (10' each, 34 participants, including 8(!) GM-s led by Péter Lékó, the youngest ever GM in chess history and 9 IM-s, probably the strongest of all time competition of this kind in Hungary).

I took part in all of these tournaments both as organizer and player. In addition I've played 9 out of 11 games by using my Rainbow Chess set as a demonstration board in the (traditional) Hungarian Championship in '95 January and many more in Team Ch.Matches in 95/96. My two years' personal experience by analysing and playing with Rainbow Chess completely confirms of Mr.Suvada's hypothesis.