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I came across this page while looking for the official notation of Circular Chess. In reference to the notation described here, the author says 'We do not know how the Constantinople chessplayers denoted the squares, but the above notation used in Circular Chess (the modern version of Byzantine Chess) looks natural and convenient.' I most emphatically disagree with his evaluation of this notation. The system of notation described here is like putting a square peg in a round hole. It's the wrong tool for the job. The notation for a circular variant ought to use polar coordinates, not cartesian coordinates. What this system has done is try to map the cartesian coordinates from a regular Chess board onto a circular board. In my PBM preset for Circular Chess, I offer a much simpler coordinate system. I simply treat rings as ranks and pie slices as files. Each pie slice has a letter, going from a to p in a clockwise order, and the rings are numbered from 1 to 4, going in an outward direction.