David Richerby wrote:
J.D. Walker wrote:
One possibility of ensuring more decisive match results would be to
change the way draws are scored. I like the idea of giving White
.45 of the point and Black .55 of the point. Mathematicians might
come up with a better way to split the point. A drawn 24 game match
would seem to be much more unlikely with this idea.

There are a number of problems with that proposal. First and
foremost, doesn't it encourage both players to play for the draw with
black?

It might not actually help too much, either. If the match is going to
be tied, it's likely that most of the games will be drawn. With only
a few wins, it's quite likely that all the wins will be with the white
pieces, which means that the match will still be tied with the
suggested scoring system.

It also has a rather counter-intuitive property. Suppose that a match
is played that would have been drawn under standard scoring of half a
point each for a draw. It follows that the players both won the same
number of games. But now look at the number of wins each player has
with each colour. Every win a player gets with a particular colour is
one less draw with that colour. In particular, winning more games
with black means drawing fewer games with black, which means fewer
points.

Consider the following four-game match, with Alice having white in the
first game.

Alice + = - = 2.1
Bob - = + = 1.9

It seems a bit strange that Bob loses the match, given that he won his
game as black, which is harder than winning with white.

I like this result better than a tie, but I agree that the idea needs an
adjustment.

I suppose you could try to fix this by changing the scores for wins,
to compensate for the points `lost' by not getting the draw.

How would the following work out?

White win = +1
Black win = +1.11
White draw = .45
Black Draw = .50

This would seem to encourage wins, and make tied matches less likely.
It also tries to give Black a scoring edge to balance the first move
edge of White. Maybe the exact scoring edge would need to be fine tuned...

If players can get used to decimal results as opposed to whole
number results it should work fine in tournaments also. We can do
it. Look at how we adapted to the metric system! Oops, I forgot,
we didn't.

The rest of the world did. :-P

Right you are sir...
--

"Do that which is right..."

Rev. J.D. Walker