News Psychology Chess players rely on familiar moves even when the game changes People use past experiences to guide decision-making, even when the present is unprecedented Well-executed starting moves in chess can tip a game’s outcome, and players often rely on tried-and-true openers. Those openers may not work well in Chess960, a chess variant that scrambles the pieces, but players tend to use them anyway. Pannonia/Getty Images By Sujata Gupta 1 hour ago Last year, my son joined the middle school chess club and began using me, a total novice, as his sparring partner. In chess, a player can choose from one of 20 opening moves, including moving a knight in the back row to one of four possible spots or any of the pawns in the front row one or two spaces forward. That opening matters a lot, determining how the game unspools and, ultimately, a player’s odds of winning. I experimented wildly, including with oddball moves, such as moving the pawn on the far right a single space forward. Given how badly that game went, I never used that opener again. Yet an opening move with a low probability of success in conventional chess might be a winner in Chess960, a decades-old variant of the classic game. In Chess960, pawns still line the front row, but the back pieces are scrambled (though in the same formation for both black and white pieces). It’s a topsy-turvy chess universe where players often rely on tried-and-true opening moves, even when an oddball move might yield greater success, researchers reported earlier this month in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.