Draw by Agreement in Chess: Rule, Procedure and History

A draw by agreement is a game that ends as a draw because one player offers it and the opponent accepts. It is one of several ways to draw a game, alongside stalemate, threefold repetition, the fifty-move rule and insufficient material, and it is the only one that needs no position on the board to qualify.

The procedure

Under the FIDE Laws a player may offer a draw at any time. The offerer first makes a move, then offers the draw verbally, then presses the clock. The opponent can accept, or decline simply by making a move, which cancels the offer. On the score sheet an offer is marked with an equals sign in brackets. A claim of a draw under another rule counts as an offer, and once it has been made it cannot be withdrawn.

Why organisers restrict it

Agreed draws can be played in a few moves when both sides want a rest day or a safe result. Elite chess has a high draw rate: of about 22,000 games between players rated 2500 or more from 1999 to 2002, 55 percent were drawn, and for the very top players above 2750 the share passed 70 percent in 2017 and 2018. Organisers have tried several remedies.

• A minimum number of moves. FIDE’s first Laws in 1929 required thirty moves before an agreed draw. The rule was dropped in 1952, reinstated in a form in 1962, made harsher in 1963 and dropped again in 1964. World Championship matches in 2016 and 2018 barred draws before move 30, and the matches of 2021, 2023 and 2024 raised the limit to move 40.
• A ban. The Sofia tournament of 2005 barred agreed draws and left only the rule-based kinds.
• Different scoring. The 3-1-0 system and the colour-based BAP scoring make a draw worth less than a win for both players.

Where it appears

The article on BAP scoring in chess traces these measures in detail, and the chess history page places them among the other rule changes that shaped the game. In correspondence chess, draw offers have their own rule: an offer stays valid only while it is still the receiving player’s turn.

The other ways a game is drawn

Agreement is only one of the routes in the FIDE Laws. Stalemate ends a game automatically when the player to move has no legal move and is not in check. Threefold repetition is a claim, not an automatic result: the same position must occur three times with the same player to move, and the claim has to be made when the repetition occurs or the right is lost. Fivefold repetition is automatic. The fifty-move rule is also a claim, available when neither side has moved a pawn or captured in the previous 50 moves, and the seventy-five-move rule ends the game automatically unless the last move was checkmate. A dead position, one in which no legal sequence can lead to checkmate, is drawn as well; bare kings, king and bishop against king, king and knight against king, and king and bishop against king and bishop with same-coloured bishops are the standard examples. Perpetual check, once a stated draw, was no longer in the rules by 1965. What marks the agreed draw out is that nothing on the board has to qualify: it needs two people who both want it.

Famous draws of each kind

Four well-known games show the variety. In the Fischer and Petrosian game of 1971 a threefold repetition arose after 30.Qe2, 32.Qe2 and 34.Qe2. Korchnoi against Karpov in 1978 was a stalemate after 124.Bg7. Timman against Lutz in 1995 was drawn under the fifty-move rule after 121…Rb5+. Petrosian against Fischer in 1958 ended by agreement after 67.f7. The last is the ordinary case: the players saw the same thing and shook hands, with no rule needed.

Sofia rules and their relatives

The most direct answer to agreed draws is to remove them. At Sofia in 2005 the organisers barred draws by agreement, while stalemate, threefold repetition, the fifty-move rule and insufficient material remained available, and any other draw required the arbiter to declare the position drawn. A refined version, the Sofia-Corsica rules, was used at the Bilbao Final Masters and in the FIDE Grand Prix of 2008 to 2010, part of the qualifying cycle for the 2012 World Championship. Players could not offer draws. They claimed them through the arbiter, who was assisted by an experienced grandmaster, and only for threefold repetition, the fifty-move rule, perpetual check or a theoretical draw decided by the Chief Arbiter. Mark Dvoretsky proposed banning agreed draws entirely and compared chess unfavourably with boxing, where such agreements are not reached. He argued that playing out a dead position is a small burden.

Other remedies that have been tried

London in 1862 was the first international round-robin, and it required drawn games to be replayed until decided. The Danish Championship introduced a similar replay format, called gladiator chess, in 2006. A 1954 FIDE statement stopped short of restoring the move rule but called an agreed draw before a serious contest began unethical. In the 1962 version of the thirty-move rule the penalty was a loss for both players, and players got round it by repeating moves on purpose. Maurice Ashley proposed in 2003 that draw offers be banned before move 50, and at Generation Chess in New York City that year agreed draws were barred before move 50. Players who agreed premature draws there faced fines of 10 percent of their appearance fee and 10 percent of prize money. Luis Rentero, organiser of the Linares tournaments, sometimes enforced a move-30 rule. John Nunn argued in 2005 that no rule change was needed, and suggested organisers simply avoid inviting players known for short draws.

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