Transcendental Chess of one side can be any of 4²×6!÷2² = 2880. There is no castling. On the first turn a player, instead of making a move, can transpose any of two pieces on the back row. In Chess960 the back rows are mirror images, but in Transcendental Chess the setup of black and white is different 2879 out of every 2880 times (there being a 1–in–2880 chance that both sides will draw the same setup). This can create inequalities in the position. One way to equalize these inequalities is to play a couplet: the players play two games, one each as
Touch-move rule The Yugoslav grandmaster Milan Matulović was nicknamed "J’adoubovic" after such an incident . The touch-move rule has existed for centuries. In the Middle Ages strict rules were considered necessary because chess was played for stakes. Luis Ramirez de Lucena gave the rule in his 1497 book "Arte de Axdres" . Benjamin Franklin referred to it in his 1786 essay "The morals of chess" . At one time the rule also required the player who played an illegal move to move his king. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Rule XIII of the London Chess Club provided: If a