wrote:
Guy Macon http://www.guymacon.com/ wrote:
I wonder if some variation on the backgammon doubling method of
forcing a losing player to resign might work...

I have toyed around with the concept, looking at a lot of different
approaches to the issue, and saw some ways it can work. It always
run into issues, and lack of acceptance. I hear people use a
doubling cube for chess in some European countries as a way to
wager.

I believe the issue here is mostly handling draws, and also having a
way to pressure one's opponent to fold. I believe using an offshoot
of a a Bronstein clock could be an answer here. Instead of just a
time delay, before you have your clock eaten into, you do it
differently. [...]

Essentially, what you seem to be saying is that faster games, with the
possibility of the players manipulating each other's clocks and
effectively asking each other to resign, will make chess more popular
as a spectator sport.

I disagree strongly. There are numerous rapidplay and blitz events
but these have not made chess into a spectator sport. Faster games do
not make chess any more popular with non-players and they reduce the
quality of the games and, therefore, reduce their interest to chess
players. A double loss! The game is no more appealing to people who
weren't interested before and is less appealing to those who were
interested.

You're also proposing to give the players more to think about
(strategies based on clock manipulation as well as moving the pieces)
in less time. That would seem to doubly reduce the quality of the
chess played and I don't, personally, see that allowing the players to
say `I bet five minutes on the clock that you're going to lose' will
make the game (which is, after all, an incomprehensible ritual of
shifting little pieces of wood around a table) any more interesting to
Joe Public.

All of these proposals to make chess `more exciting' fail to take into
account the fundamental problem. The supposed audience for chess
doesn't understand what chess is and why one move is any better than
any other. It doesn't matter how quickly or slowly the game
progresses.

Suppose there is a competition to read out novels in German. This
obviously isn't going to be popular in countries where German isn't
widely spoken. Changing the rules of the competition to reading out
short stories in German won't help. Messing around with time controls
and draw frequencies in chess is exactly the same thing.


Dave.

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