Yes! White moves first, then black makes two moves in a row, followed by regular back and forth moves after.

This would theoretically allow black to start on equal terms.

What about playing two games at the same time?

One you play as black and the other white.

This has been tried:

"Basque chess - A chess competition in which the players simultaneously play each other two games on two boards, each playing White on one and Black on the other. There is a clock at both boards. It removes the bonus in mini-matches of playing White first. Basque chess was first played in the 2012 Donostia Chess Festival in the Basque Country, Spain. Also called Basque System." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_chess

This story on the event says it was originally Bronstein's idea. https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2012/01/23/chess-notes/0GSY...

And did it work?

Was the game fair for both players?

Allow Black to choose White's first move. They aren't allowed to pick f3 (huh, looks like Stockfish greatly prefers f3 to g4)

Or more, based on https://lichess.org/analysis you'd have to ban a couple more moves like a4/h4, but you could opt to restrict picking first moves within Stockfish range at some depth of -0.1 to 0.1 (looks like c4 is enough to be 0.1 at depth 47)

This may increase the draw rate

If you want to keep engine analysis out of the rules, you can go the "evenly split candy between siblings" route: after White's first move & before Black's response, Black may elect to trade positions

That seems needlessly unfair towards white. Isn't the pie rule (one player plays a move, the other chooses which colour they play) strictly better?

Yes, but it'll get _much_ closer to 0 than e4 or d4, which are already close enough to 0 to produce good games won by black. I wouldn't call it needlessly unfair

It also means White still gets the edge of being able to prepare for the first move vs their opponent, ie they may've studied 1.Nc3 lines much deeper in preparation, whereas currently White gets the edge of choosing the first move & it's advantage

ie White gets to decide whether they prefer their e4 prep or d4 prep against their opponent's prep as Black, so if White doesn't want to play against their opponent's Sicilian they play d4. This is a theoretically moot but real advantage. See Fischer's performance with c4: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/explorer?pid=19233&side=whit...

See also how well 1.g3 or 1.b3 have performed while Stockfish gives both a solid 0 eval

In short, while I started with Yes, I mean No. Because b3/g3 are equal enough that White gets an edge by deciding whether the game will be a g3 or a b3 game

Hmm? Chess is already very drawish at the top level, a specific goal that they highlight in this paper is to unbalance the game.

None of the suggested changes in the paper give black equal or more wins than white. At best they reduce the number of draws, or reduce the disadvantage of black: https://dl.acm.org/cms/attachment/2b6acfe5-8a20-4630-8372-d5...

> None of the suggested changes in the paper give black equal or more wins than white.

Sure. Why would that be the goal though?

Many of them do reduce the difference between black and white, by increasing the number of draws, but that's not generally seen as desirable.

Time auctions, used in armageddon chess