zdrakec wrote:
I also see no problem with draws per se, I simply think that
allowing one to be agreed is arbitrary and artificial.

You're going to need a better justification than that. Chess as a
whole is arbitrary and artificial! Why does the little horsey move in
L-shapes? Why do the players take it in turns to move? Why only one
piece at a time? Why can't pawns move backwards? Why can't rooks
turn corners? Why can't the king be captured? Why is the board eight
by eight? Why are there exactly two players?


I guess what I mean is that the draw should be the logical outcome
of the play, not the outcome of the players' possible unwillingness
to risk a decision.

Don't you think that, after a long, level game, the natural result is
a draw, raher than insisting that play continue until one of the
players makes a blunder due to exhaustion?


The reason I speculated that perpetual check would go away, if a
player was not allowed to repeat the position three-fold, is that
eventually, in a perpetual, the position would in fact get repeated.
At some point, the player will have to choose a move that does not
bring about a repetition (if we have outlawed the three-fold
repetition).

Now, *that* is arbitrary. Perpetual check is a defensive resource:
player A only attempts to put player B in perpetual check to force a
draw. If repetition is outlawed, there are two things that can happen
in any instance of perpetual check: either player A finds he can't
give check again in some position, so he has to play something else
and probably loses (why else was he trying to force a draw?); or
player B finds he can't play the best response to a check and ends up
losing serious material or getting checkmated. Which of these two
things happens is decided by essentially random-looking things that
happened before the perpetual started.


Dave.

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