"zdrakec" wrote in message
...
Hullo all:

Giving some thought to how draws happen over the board, it occurs to
me that many of the rules in place that allow draws to happen are
quite arbitrary, and have little or nothing to do with the actual
movement of the pieces. With that in mind, the following rule changes
strike me as perhaps interesting:
1. Draws may not be agreed.
2. Three-fold repetition shall be illegal. That is, the player having
the move may not make a move that repeats the position for the third
time. If he has no other legal move, we may regard this as a form of
stalemate, perhaps. I am not completely sure, but I think that this
rule would do away with perpetual check. By analogy, I refer to the ko
rule in Go, which essentially prevents the same position from
appearing on the board more than once (with some rather esoteric
exceptions).
3. There shall be no 50-move limit. This becomes more practical than
it once was, in an age where clocks can have a delay, and can add a
time increment per move.
4. Since the object of the game is to place the opponent's king in a
position from which it cannot avoid being captured, I suggest that
stalemate should be a loss for the stalemated player. In principal,
the player who has stalemated his opponent has accomplished the
primary goal of the game. Of course, this has been suggested many
times before.

I am not certain, but that would seem to leave lack of mating material
as the sole way to draw a game. Naturally, there can still be abuse,
but it would, I think, tend to be obvious...

Actually, if you disallow the current drawing methods, make repetition
illegal, and define an inability to make a legal move as losing stalemate,
then there would never by *any* draws! (Even K vs. K would be
decisive because positions would eventually repeat.) Of course it wouldn't be
chess exactly since endgame theory would change dramatically, and
it wouldn't objectively be a good game (because it could take quite
a long time to exhaust all possible board positions), but it strikes me
as a very interesting intellectual exercize.

..