‘Back to the Future with Casablanca Chess’ was the tagline for the elite rapid tournament held in Morocco last month. The intriguing premise was that games would begin from positions taken from the opening phase of famous historical games. The four guinea pigs for this experiment – dubbed the Casablanca Chess Variant – were Magnus Carlsen, Viswanathan Anand, Hikaru Nakamura and Bassem Amin; the latter grandmaster from Egypt is rated in the world’s top 50.
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