of the bishops first, and ignore the distinction between the king and rooks. Once the positions of the bishops, knights and queen are known, there is only one possibility for the remaining three squares. In the places where division of whole numbers is done, it is always done giving a quotient (designated q1,q2,..) and a remainder (designated r1,r2 ..). There are 16 ways to put two bishops on opposite colored squares. These are shown and numbered in the table above. The entries actually can be calculated using simple arithmetic, but the table method seems less error prone. For the standard SP the bishop's code is 6. In any SP, when looking at the arrangement of the other pieces around the bishops, it is helpful to write down the NQ-skeleton for that SP. This is done by ignoring the bishops and replacing the "K" and "R" by a common symbol, say "-". The NQ-skeleton for the standard SP is -NQ-N-. The sections below showing Scharnagl's Methods and the Fritz9 Methods are independent, and may be read in any order. Fritz9 methods Upon entry to Fischer random chess, Fritz9 prompts the user to enter a position idn or to "draw lots". If the user wishes to choose the first rank configuration of pieces, he/she must know how to get at the idn, but, unfortunately, Fritz9 does not use the standard method described above. The table below shows a quick way to get the Fritz9 idn for any SP. For any SP, after ignoring the bishops, attention is given first to the knights (rather than to the queen). After taking account of the arrangement of the two knights in six squares (skipping over bishops), the queen is left with four possibilities: 0,1,2,3 (counting from the a-side of the board and skipping over bishops and knights). The queen's position is the number of hyphens to the left of the "Q" in the NQ-skeleton for the SP. Given an SP, extract the bishop's code, the NQ-skeleton and its queen's position. Then, locate, in the appropriate column, the NQ-skeleton at hand, say at No. M. The Fritz9 idn = (bishop's code) + M. For the standard SP, we extract 6 RNQKNR and 1 and get Fritz9 idn = 6 + 353 = 359. Fritz9 NQ-skeleton Table Anyone with Fritz9 can verify this table by entering in the idns. It directly refers to just those SPs with