On Dec 6, 10:06 pm, help bot wrote:
On Dec 6, 1:54 pm, zdrakec wrote:

When not just two, but
many, many grandmasters, for instance, make
a habit of this it destroys the spectator and
sporting value of their games -- on which many
organizers depend financially and otherwise.

Anyone who goes to spectate at a chess event deserves everything he
gets!
How many spectators were the organizers of the Kramnik-Leko match
expecting to turn up so that they would make a profit?

"SBD" wrote in message
...
Always good to see ideas here, although I must confess at the outset
that I see nothing wrong with draws per se. In college football, for
an analogy, the tiebreak rules just serve, in my opinion, to exhaust
and injure the players, just to try to get a decisive result, which is
often just due to an error of exhaustion, and ruins a well-played
game.

Don't you think that its noteworthy that in most sports ties are
either impossible or fairly rare, and in those sports where they are
possible, most of them have taken some steps to reduce their
number? (tiebreaks, OTs, scoring incentives etc.)
I'd be curious if you could name a single sport that has
gone the other direction -where rules which produced decisive
results were amended in order to produce more "well-played" ties?

I can't, and I think the reason is obvious. Most people see
an important *purpose* of a contest being producing a winner.
In that light, ties are just failures. I suppose the "chess as art" school
might sees things differently, but my games at least are way
too ugly to even remotely qualify.


On Dec 6, 12:54 pm, zdrakec wrote:
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.

Why not?


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.

So you would force him to lose if the only other option(s) loses? This
seems to degrade the game. However, it does seem worthy of discussion.
Of all your suggestions, this one is the most interesting.

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.

It would not do away with perpetual check, since that isn't part of
the rules, but in a perpetual, there is a three-fold.

Without this, a game could go on literally forever.

Thoughts?

Those are mine, for good or bad. But why so many games have to be
decisive is a mystery to me. A well-played draw is a good thing in my
eyes.

"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.

..

"David Richerby" wrote in message
...
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.


There is nothing random or arbitrary about a version of chess that
prohibits repetitions, such as Go. As in regular chess,
he who calculates deeper wins.

What I find interesting about all the threads that address draws in
chess is that they are filled with false and illogical arguments by those
who like the current draw rules. This has led me to conclude that
there is a very strong *emotional* attachment to draws.

On Dec 6, 7:01 pm, David Richerby
wrote:

help bot wrote:
The problem with premature agreements to draw is already handled by
the rules (which however, are not properly enforced).

Please cite the FIDE Law

Of course, David Richerby has no quote of me
stating that there is a *FIDE* law which handles
this problem. Here in America, "we" play under
the auspices of the mighty USCF (you may have
heard of it via Sam Sloan), which has its own
rules for competitive play.

Just to make a point, whenever discussion has
turned to the ratings of posters here, it is normal
and customary to specify "FIDE" when one is
talking about something other than USCF ratings --
that's how dominant (in terms of numbers) "we"
Americans are on these forums, how focused
it is on the wanky world of chess in the USA.
The exception is where the talk centers on titles
like IGM, IM, FM, or where the numbers are in
that same range (i.e. 2450-euros Phil Innes).

At one time, I was up on all the latest nuances
of Tim Redman-tweakings, but lately, I have begun
to focus more on winning on the board, not on
time or by a random technicality. So allow me to
merely paraphrase the rule I mentioned, rather
than do an authoritative quote:

*It is forbidden for two players to agree to a draw
before a real contest (understood: "of skill") has
begun.*

What this means is that after 1. e4 e5, 2. Nc3
....Nc6, 3. Nb1 Nb8, it is illegal to agree to a draw
"between friends" -- because of the above rule.

In practice, things are not always crystal-clear; for
example, I have accepted (but never made) a draw
offer while still in the late opening, because I felt
that playing on was tantamount to suicide, having
already been clearly outplayed. A petty pedant
could take the move number by itself and work up
a case that this was "cheating".


that prohibits the players from agreeing a
draw in a position that isn't obviously drawn?

As for FIDE, their rules can assume the presence
of arbiters at every board -- as unreal a fantasy as
time travel, aliens who look and talk like humans,
or 2.7% real inflation. One day I might just play in
some big tournament and later have someone come
up to me and say: "are you aware that since you
lost to five FIDE-rated players in a row, your result
qualifies for FIDE-rating purposes?" That's when
you'll see a posting here, asking how to calculate
a FIDE rating where you have lost every game.

'Till then, let the delusional posters talk of their
2450 FIDE ratings and near-titles; let them imagine
themselves as competing for world titles, under the
wicked honchos of FIDE (with an omniscient
arbiter at the board!).


-- help bot

On Dec 6, 8:16 pm, Kenneth Sloan wrote:

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?

the horsey does NOT move in L-shapes. The horsey moves in a straight
line - directly to any square which is closest to the original square
without touching (8-connected) the original square.

That is not correct. Moving in a straight line can
knock over other men, so the correct method is to
JUMP the horsey over them, landing neatly on the
forefeet. I saw it done in The Mask of Zorro, I think.

---

Where DR really went wrong was in LEAPING to
the conclusion that pawn sacrifices dictate the
level of interest in the play. In reality, having a
single pawn advantage be decisive by rule would
lead to a complete re-evaluation of piece values,
most likely a devaluation in which their sacrifice
becomes even more common, while pawn sac's
recede.


-- help bot

David Kane wrote:
"David Richerby" wrote:
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.

There is nothing random or arbitrary about a version of chess that
prohibits repetitions, such as Go. As in regular chess, he who
calculates deeper wins.

There isn't a man alive who can analyze to 100 ply.


Dave.

(And probably not more than two women.)

--
David Richerby Flammable Car (TM): it's like a
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ high-performance luxury car but it
burns really easily!

Guy Macon http://www.guymacon.com/ wrote:
My opinion is that the game of Chess is OK as is is.

Amen, brother.


Dave.

--
David Richerby Sadistic Tool (TM): it's like a
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ screwdriver but it wants to hurt you!

zdrakec wrote:

Thanks for the feedback. I also see no problem with draws per se, I
simply think that allowing one to be agreed is arbitrary and
artificial. 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.

If it was a case of a single game, I think you are right. But
in a tournament, there are many games, one after another, more or less.
And a player soon gets to understand that there are two 'games':
one to play the single game, and the other to last through the tournament.

In that second context, the agreed draw make reasonably good sense.


--
Anders Thulin anders*thulin.name http://www.anders.thulin.name/

On Dec 7, 12:56 am, "David Kane" wrote:

DK ...I'd be curious if you could name a single sport that has
gone the other direction -where rules which produced decisive
results were amended in order to produce more "well-played" ties?

DK I can't, and I think the reason is obvious. Most people see
an important *purpose* of a contest being producing a winner.
In that light, ties are just failures. I suppose the "chess as art"
school
might sees things differently, but my games at least are way
too ugly to even remotely qualify.

The "chess as science" school might see things differently, too. The
only school that _clearly_ sees things the way DK does is "chess as
mass entertainment".

I do not mean to scoff at the plight of chess professionals who hope
to make a better living. That is a legitimate concern. I just think
the debate should be seen for what it is.

LT