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
Null-move heuristic of chess positions where employing the null-move heuristic can result in severe tactical blunders. In these "zugzwang" (German for "forced to move") positions, the player whose turn it is to move has only bad moves as their legal choices, and so would actually be better off if allowed to forfeit the right to move. In these positions, the null-move heuristic may produce a cutoff where a full search would not have found one, causing the program to assume the position is very good for a side when it may in fact be very bad for them. To avoid using the