Random Chess Position Generator

What is actually in this list

Not random arrangements of pieces. Named positions and structures, the ones that recur across thousands of games and have been studied for centuries.

A few of them:

• Lucena Position
• Philidor Position
• Saavedra Position
• Trebuchet
• Mutual Zugzwang
• Distant Opposition
• Corresponding Squares
• Carlsbad Structure

Read those names again. A siege engine. A Spanish priest. A concept borrowed from German with no English equivalent. This is a vocabulary, and it exists because chess did something no other game managed: it built a library of positions that are finished.

Drawing a position

1. Press Generate for one position, then go and set it up on a board and work it out.
2. Ask for seven and you have a week of endgame study, which is more than most club players ever do.
3. Type into Contains to pull a theme: type opposition, or structure, or zugzwang.
4. Copy to keep your study list.

Where these come from

Endgame positions, studies and pawn structures, gathered and checked by hand against standard endgame references. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

Why a position gets a name

In most games, a position is just where the pieces happen to be. In chess, a small number of positions have been analysed so completely that the result is not a matter of opinion. They are solved. Play them correctly and the outcome is certain, and every strong player alive knows what that outcome is.

Once a position is solved, it stops being a position and becomes a destination. Rook and pawn endings turn up in something like one game in ten, and when they do, both players are steering. The side with the extra pawn is trying to reach one particular arrangement, because it is a known win. The defender is trying to reach a different one, because it is a known draw. Neither is calculating. They are navigating towards places that already have names.

This is the thing chess has that almost nothing else does. Not opening theory, which is a matter of taste and fashion. A body of finished knowledge, worked out over five hundred years by people who published, argued, and corrected each other. The names on these positions are the names of the correspondents.

Zugzwang, or the harm in having to do something

English borrowed this word from German because English had no need for it before chess.

Zugzwang is the situation where every legal move you have makes your position worse, and you would give anything to be allowed to sit still, and you are not allowed. You must move. The obligation itself is what destroys you.

Stop and see how peculiar that is. In almost everything else, having more options cannot hurt you, because you could always decline them. An extra choice is free. That intuition is so deep that most people never notice they hold it.

Chess breaks it, and it breaks it for one reason: passing is not allowed. Remove that single rule, permit a player to say I do nothing, and zugzwang vanishes from the game entirely. Every position where you are lost only because it is your turn becomes a position where you shrug and wait.

The purest form of it has a name too, borrowed from a medieval siege engine. The trebuchet is a position where whoever must move, loses. Not the weaker side. Whoever moves. Two kings, a pawn each, a perfect symmetry of doom. The entire game reduces to the question of whose turn it is, and there is nothing to calculate and nowhere to hide.

Which explains a whole category of chess moves that look like nothing. The waiting move, the triangulation, the king shuffling back and forth to no apparent purpose. Those players are not passing time. They are passing the obligation, which is the only thing on the board worth having.

The most important position in chess is named after the wrong man

Ask any strong player to name the single position a club player must know, and a great many will say the Lucena. It is the winning method in rook and pawn against rook, the ending you will meet again and again for the rest of your life. One endgame authority has called it possibly the most important position in endgame theory.

It is named for Luis Ramírez de Lucena, a Castilian who wrote the oldest surviving printed book on chess, in 1497.

The position does not appear in it.

The earliest surviving discussion is in a book published in 1634 by Alessandro Salvio, who himself attributed the analysis to an earlier Italian, Scipione Genovino. Historians who went back to check the sources found that the attribution to Lucena appears to have come from an error in a German handbook in the nineteenth century, where an editor gave a reference that pointed to Lucena's book, and it pointed to nothing.

The mistake was copied. It has been copied ever since, into every textbook, every video, every coaching session. Nobody can fix it now, because a name is not a fact about who did the thing, it is a fact about what people call it, and everybody calls it this.

So the most important position in the most thoroughly documented game in history is named after a man who, as far as anybody can tell, never wrote it down. Chess is very good at knowing things. It is no better than anything else at knowing where it learned them.

A priest, a newspaper column, and one move

The other name in that list belongs to a man who was not a good chess player at all.

In 1875 two players reached an ending in a game and agreed a draw. Twenty years later, a chess columnist in Glasgow printed a version of the position in his newspaper, presenting it as a beautiful draw. The trick was a stalemate. White queens his pawn, Black offers his rook, White must take it, and the black king stands there with no legal move. Drawn. Very elegant, and the column ran the solution.

A week or two later, a Spanish priest named Fernando Saavedra, who lived in Glasgow and belonged to the chess club there, and who was by every account an unremarkable player, pointed out that White need not promote to a queen.

Promote to a rook instead. The rook does not stalemate Black, because a rook covers fewer squares than a queen and leaves the black king a move. And a rook is enough. White threatens mate, Black must defend, and White wins the rook or the king.

Deliberately choosing the weaker piece because the stronger one would spoil everything. Saavedra never did anything else of note in chess. It has been called the most famous endgame study in existence, and he is one of the very few people in the history of the game to be remembered for a single move.

Computers have since checked it, exhaustively, and he was right.

Questions people ask

Are these positions really solved?

The small ones, completely. Every position with seven or fewer pieces has been worked out by computer, all the way to the end, with no guessing. A machine can tell you not just who wins but in how many moves, from any of them. The named positions were solved by hand first, over centuries, and the machines agree.

Why study endgames when most games never reach one?

Because the ones that do are the ones you lose. Also, an endgame is the only part of chess where you can be certain, and certainty teaches you what a position actually is, rather than what it feels like.

What is the opposition?

Two kings facing each other with one square between them. The player who does not have to move controls the situation, because the other king must give ground. It is zugzwang in miniature, and almost every pawn ending is an argument about it.

Why are pawn structures in a list of positions?

Because a pawn structure is a position, in the only sense that matters. Pawns move slowly and rarely go backwards, so the shape they make outlasts every piece on the board and dictates where those pieces belong. The pieces are the sentence. The pawns are the grammar.

References

1. Lucena position, on the misattribution to Lucena's 1497 book and the nineteenth century source of the error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucena_position
2. Winter, E. The Lucena Position, Chess Notes, tracing the attribution error through the nineteenth century literature. https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/lucena.html
3. Saavedra position, on Fernando Saavedra, the 1895 Glasgow Weekly Citizen column, and the underpromotion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saavedra_position