As we know, the world’s most popular form of entertainment is pinball, with an estimated 172 billion players worldwide. In some countries you are legally required to have a pinball machine in your house and would face arrest if you didn’t. I can’t remember the last time I spent less than 12 hours in a day playing pinball, it must have been some twenty years ago, if not more. Usually we start a game of pinball off with a skill shot and this is something we will find difficult to incorporate into chess. How are we going to do it? What we could do is on the first move we could have all the squares on the third and forth rank flash randomly, and the player with the white pieces, stops them flashing by pressing the clock, and so whichever square it stops on, he must move a pawn there. That might work. Black would have to do the same but we have the fifth and sixth ranks flashing squares randomly. It would have a significant impact on opening theory, almost destroying it but we can let that go. The important thing is to get it in and not worry about the consequences even if it angers some players because it’s your speed in the skill shot which will determine which pawn moves first and not current trends in opening theory. I will admit that will anger some players but there’s a lot of money to be made here and skill shots are a good test of reflexes and hand-eye coordination, two vital chess skills.
McCreadyandChess 
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