Caruana Wins No-Castling Event, Kramnik Second

Are chaturanga tournaments next?

There is a reason castling was introduced; namely, to speed up the game, but as with any innovation the use and value (and dangers) of the invention rapidly exceed the designer’s intentions. For several years now Vladimir Kramnik has been promoting a number of chess variants aimed at maintaining the core of standard chess while reducing the theoretical load, and no-castling chess is one such version.

Kramnik may not be participating in classical tournaments any longer, but he is willing to play slow games when it’s one of his variants, and that’s what he did in Dortmund last week, participating in a four-player double round-robin with Fabiano Caruana, Dmitrij Kollars, and Pavel Eljanov. Kramnik played well, going 1.5-.5 against Eljanov and trading wins with Caruana and Kollars, but his 3.5-2.5 score was only good enough for second place. First went to the highest-rated player, Caruana, who went 1.5-.5 against the lower seeds to score 4-2 overall. Kollars finished with 2.5 points, and Eljanov came in last with 2 points. (Games here.)

What do you think of this variant? If you had to choose between playing Chess960 or no-castling chess, which would you pick?