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H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Sep 22, 2022 09:50 AM UTC in reply to Gerd Degens from Mon Aug 15 06:36 AM:

I have somewhat of a dilemma concerning the move notation for castling in the Interactive Diagram. Normally King-side castling is O-O, Queen-side castling is O-O-O, both for white and black. This then corresponds to short and long castling, respectively.

But what if the Kings start closer to the a-file? Would it still make sense to keep calling the a-side the Queen side, and use O-O-O for that castling. I know that the official notation for Chess960 does this, but that is really another case, because the King there can start anywhere, but at least ends on the c-file, like in orthodox Q-side castling. So it is indeed like a long castling, only with messed-up initial position because of the shuffling.

But what if the King in a-side castling ended on the b-file. Does it still deserve to be written as O-O-O? I encountered this problem in Elven Chess, which is unusual in that it has rotation symmetry rather than reflection symmetry in the initial setup; usually variants that have that do not have castling, but Elven Chess does. The white King starts on the f-file, and moves 3 spaces to i1 on the 10-wide board. So it would be normal to call that O-O, and the castling to c1 O-O-O.

But now what for black? His King starts on e10, and castling would bring it to b10 or h10. I would be inclined to call the castling to b10 O-O now, not O-O-O.

Any ideas what we should elevate to standard here?


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