A warning to atomic newcomers

TL;DR scroll to the end.

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So you've spent an afternoon playing rapid and blitz chess, and you're crashed out. You notice the variant section in the lobby, something you haven't paid much attention to before. Out of curiosity, you play one random game, one random variant, and pretty soon you're hooked. So what's wrong with all this?

Starting out

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When we play a new variant, we have an idea of what the strategy should be, what pieces we should move and when, during the opening, middlegame, and endgame. These strategies may not be consciously known to us, but that's not the problem here. The problem is when the strategy is utterly, yet inexplicably wrong.

What am I talking about? Well, I'll give an example of my own, back when I was trying out KoTH: (If these are either too obvious or blatantly wrong, KoTH players, I don't care - I don't play KoTH anymore)

• Dominate the center with your pawns and knights
• Open the way up for the king early
• Do the same for your queen to ensure the opponent doesn't get the chance to advance his king

and so on. For some variants, it's pretty easy for a newbie to generate an idea, however dim, as to how to win. We can do this same process for variants like three-check and chess960 and more. The problem, then, is when we can't.

(Here's an example of one of my games:)

When things are not how they seem

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Atomic, unfortunately, is not intuitive enough for this strategy method to work. My personal theory on this is that unlike the mechanics of other variants (get the king to the center, don't let the king get checked thrice, and so on), the mechanic of atomic (captures kill the capturing piece, captured piece, and non-pawn pieces surrounding the kill - mate or explode the enemy king to win) does not easily translate over into an understanding that, say, Nf3 must be responded with f6 or a similar move restricting the knight's movement.

And when people don't know what they're doing, they fall back to patterns they're familiar with. And where do they get those patterns from? Regular chess. So the most common opening among atomic newbies is e4 or d4 -> leading to the atomic Scholar's Mate:

or worse, the Fool's Mate:

(I have 78 games of the latter kind: https://lichess.org/@/nrizwan/search?turnsMax=4&perf=14&players.a=nrizwan&players.winner=nrizwan&status=60&sort.field=d&sort.order=desc [searching up for atomic games ending in 4 moves... where I wasn't the loser :)])

So what's the problem?

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Well, how would you like it if you kept getting mated in 4 moves, with no explanation? That's not all. I distinctly remember that I was struggling to get from 1300 to 1400, but then sailed through to 1550 - because of games like these 78. So even now, I still have a nagging feeling of discontent that I haven't really earned my current atomic rating (1622 as of writing), though that's also partly because we don't have that many atomic players as such. Are games like these to blame? Is the reason we have a low player base because people keep getting mated in incomprehensible openings?

(Please don't take this too seriously. Whatever reasons are for our relative rarity, they are most certainly more nuanced than a simple dissatisfaction amongst newcomers)

My advice: before randomly trying out atomic against actual humans, read an article, explore a study, play against the computer, and understand the subtleties of atomic chess before diving into the deep end. The mechanics of atomic start to feel very sublime once you understand the dynamics that emerge from them, which is a feeling everyone should have the privilege to experience, almost just like... playing chess for the first time. Ignore my advice if you're looking to quickly get frustrated.

To conclude: if you're a newcomer from vanilla chess, and if you're willing to have that kind of feeling again, try atomic chess. Just know what you're getting into before you commit.