Chess without draws

Chess and it's rules has constantly changed. The last rule change was in 2014. So there is nothing wrong with change. Feels like every decade, something is new for the chess players. I wonder what's going to change in 2024.

So let's adapt to change, it's easier then resisting.

Chess is not like life, unless we fix the scoring.
When we die, we don't get scored for the way we died. We get scored for how we did our life. That person over all was a good person, even if nothing was accomplish after retirement. So his retirement years ended in a draw, but still got a score for his life.

Chess players both get a ½ point for drawing, but they also need to be scored for the game played. There will always be leaders and followers. So there is not draws in that either. Who lead the game is the bonus ½ point score that needs to be added to the present draws.

Nothing is removed, just complementing the game. Unless we live in a world of chess where complements do not exist. That would be poor sportsmanship.

youtu.be/rhZFfB5ih60

randalolson.com/2014/05/27/a-data-driven-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-chess-moves-captures-and-checkmates/#:~:text=Over%20time%2C%20the%20average%20chess,every%205%20ply%20in%202014.

ches rules as such have not changed. There few minor tweaks related to competitive chess but basic game has not changes will not. Most radical rule change I know is the 5-fold repetiin is draw and 75 moves without pawn move capture is draw (no claiiming necessary) which really are mere tools to avoid situation two foolds endagering tournament schedule onwards endlessly in a game that a draw. an almost zero effect rule and definately does not affect how people play the game. Last real change was unifying castling rules at 18th century.

Introduction of clock again is not really change in game but tournament arrangement

well we could have clean databases for a change, no need to seek completions.. remove all termination agreements between players. the insuficient material or no progress are supposed to be objective by non-player referee subjective no?

I agree draws are needed. I just don't like the non core rule termiinations. so the least the better. no point is lumping PAT with MAT. trying to discern them is a fun core rule application of notions of timing or tempo, or turn (i keep having trouble with the nuances behind those words.... forgot initiative in that list).

it is just that non unitary strategies or concern that seem to plague quite a few high level contexts start wheighing a bit too much at database level on what a single game could be.... first the clocks, then the 50 move rule, and then the bathroom break agreement termination.....

also, if chessing to the last possible decision was the norm, I would not feel obliged to follow some meta etiquette begging opponent to humor my need to play and let my inner chess animal experience as much chess as possible.... no moral debt, it would be the norm.....

@Toscani said in #21:
>

did i hear correctly, you would like the ability for draw games to be rewarded more than just its current many games contribution weight. that both players can maintain the balance and how much within that game has fluctuated in quality be recorded.

so surface under the curve of each more scoring throughout the game?

but we don't have any tool that do not require another tournament layer of faith (engine tournaments). you would be piling up on top of the same thing that you want being more fine grain.

If this game isn't a draw, what should it be?



You could say my opponent gets the "win" because at the end he has 44 seconds left on the clock to my 20 seconds.

@cashcow8 said in #25:
> If this game isn't a draw, what should it be?

Well I think the last op concern was about the quality of all your moves versus that of oppenent.. That since we can post game get a hindsight engine analysis (whole game going backward in its legal tree probing to assess position score, a different way that actually doing each position in absence of knowledge of the following moves), we could design some ply per ply aware measure of chessing effort at each position a player has a decision to make.

So, if you go to the lichess game page of your game there is a plot


as a pic, it does not tell you directly what would be the one sided move quality effort, but one does see the many fluctuations before things eventually settle toward draw odds on both side (saying odds because the end position is legal draw, either threefold (if no 50 move administrative rule), or 50 move rule.. that can be proven mathematically, extreme case of insufficient material or what was the other one?

I think if we did have a real accurate tool to measure each move increment or decrement of odds at each ply, then we could intergrate both one sided such deltas over the whole game, and divide by the depth of the game. And we would get accumulated rate of improving odds (signed) for the whole game..

Often human games would fluctuate through a succession of SF mistakes, and yet the average balance of the game might evolve in one direction, in spite of the seqeunce of alternativing mistakes..... That makes me wonder about the nature of mistakes.... (besides the 3 or 4 bin classification, of course).

But we don,t have such a tool. And using SF without any measure of its accuracy in legal chess world, we would have to use a belief that human chess and all its demographics with human diversity of developments (what makes a person) resulting in best human population unbiased competitive ratings would be as well covered by the populations of engines in engines tournaments, giving SF the top rating. engines are the product of few humans conceptions of legal chess, truncated tree searches. Moreover, the engine rating are also about WDL outcome within the tournament games pools.

somewhere we are floating on circular logic. We could give up, and say we believe in SF to be the best covering of legal chess, better than us humans combined (covering by population does not mean individual best.. SF can beat any human individual, does it mean it would beat all the players combined? i know not practical question, but in machine learning it would make sense, or at least in the mathematical formalisms underlying machine learning.

anyway.. not sure i am readable here....

in short the problem i see with using SF scoring of each and every move as rating input ingredient is that we would eventually adapt to become SF emulators.... (if that is not stastically a possible trend already, from training and post-game practices).

At least we know as human to call on game terminations. Each of us. using SF for more fine grain official rating fodder, would be a new category change. not a human portable game anymore.

I would use grains of salts everywhere and use such scaling with mental exception at the ready for explicit mention. I am not ready to accept SF, the result of a few programmers (however many there are, they are not of same magnitude as there are or have been very good human players, or just any players, as we are talking about legal chess first, from which best chess would emerge from. (best chess is part of legal chess, and has to be characterized one day within... that is my scientific belief).

I think we have had a tendency to adapt to few humans will embedded in machine programming (not blaiming devs, just the whole techonology market or population acceptance of information technology), very easily, and a bit too much in the conformist direction (wihtout realizing, only those with difficulties fitting the common mold get to fell the friction daily, but we will slowly disappear (evolution is not always progress and self-sustaining, it does have cul de sacs).

I would hope that chess being controllable experimentally, would allow us to discern such things.. but i find that wanting a god first, and not understanding its mysterious ways, seems to be the goto mechanism.

The analysis engine of my game showed we had the same average centipawn loss (18) but his accuracy rating was 92% against my 91% (they are often high when you get to dead endgames) and I made 6 inaccuracies against his 4, but maybe his were "more inaccurate" than mine. In any case, I don't think one should change the rules to suggest that game was a win for either side by any means.

If you want a better way for tie-breaks than armageddon, then play 2 games with each side having a significant material advantage, and assuming they both win with it, the one who checkmates in the fewest number of moves wins. Maybe one minor piece. Play the games at 5+5.

A winner needs to be declared after one game. The bonus is for the game played, not the way it ended.
Black gets a ½ point for drawing. The result was 91% Accuracy.
White gets a ½ point for drawing. The result was 92% Accuracy.
Nothing has changed to chess ! From the result we give a ½ point to each player. So nobody lost. No zero points. White gets the bonus point for better accuracy!! Results 1 vs ½ points and the pairings continue. The game has not changed.

Chess is not all speed. It's quality too! If Berserk gives extra points than Drawn games can too by using accuracy. It's not complicated. The graph also shows that it has more white, then black. That means something too. White maintained the advantage longer than the black.

Give credit, where credit is due. White's extra effort should give a bonus of ½ point. Just like bonuses at work for producing more. That's part of life to. Chess is like life, so give the bonus time and bonus point. Back in the old days (1860s) chess did not have graphs to see this or accuracy results, but today we do. What's there not to understand. We did not have the tools back then, but we do now.

You can still build a home with standard manual tools, but most will use modernized electric tools. Why leave chess behind with manual standards that date back to the 1860s?

It's the same situation as increment time. Some just don't want to use it, but it's there now. That too has changed chess. The tools have changed from analog to digital clocks and OTB to online. There are websites that have shown a lot of changes to chess. They are not minor changes. Back a long time ago, a queen moved like a King. The chessboard had to colors. The en passant, the castling, the clocks added to chess. When I was very young I could start the game with two pawns moved forward one square or using only one pawn to jump two squares on the first move only. The digital age is affecting chess in multiple ways. The present score of 1, ½ and 0 is not the only way to score chess. FIDE suggest two methods and lichess includes the berserk. Drawn game score can have a bonus too, just like the clock that got bonus time or increment time. It does not mean everyone will adapt to the idea until they see the advantage of using it in a tournament. The drawn games no longer needs to remain undecided with both getting only ½ point. If you play better, even if the game ends in a draw, your quality of the game will show. Ethically, it's not a crime to get a bonus. People say play for the win. So use the ½ bonus point to fight against those that play for a draw.

new.uschess.org/news/evolution-modern-chess-rules-draws

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_(chess)#:~:text=of%20Chess.-,Scoring,-%5Bedit%5D

2023 Laws of Chess. See there are changes, even if it's just terminology. Chess seems permitted to keep up with the times.
www.fide.com/news/2164
rcc.fide.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/20230101Laws-of-Chess_tableofchanges.pdf

www.regencychess.co.uk/blog/2012/07/chess-noob-10-how-the-rules-of-chess-have-changed-over-the-centuries/

I don't see that there should be a winner. I don't think the attraction of chess being the outcome, but more about the struggle. The domination imperative does not have to be there. if one is tying against equal true average strength, then the game shows that. Forcing wins, even in such context would make for very unstable results..

One way, might be by introducing rules that radically change mobility per pieces.. amazon queen.... the side with initiative (or initially first to play) might get even more win odds.. very difficult to stay balanced... even with equal players.... I don,t agree with the axiom that games should be only wins or lose.. (and it was not my earlier points in KO thread, i was just exploring, what Ko might have meant).

But considering the consequences, I don't mind.. not same thing. It also bring people to share knowledge about what rule-sets do what, and what happened in history.. But game evolution toward fair odds, and rational challenge might be a thing.. making a game unstable, might not be in line with the chess hybrids losing randomiser dice throw in very early chess ancestors.

I think that while the rules were stil have a lot of inherent mobility imbalances, people would have to trust some hope of winning by accepting to be the second to play.. so throwing dice might have been seen as a odds flattener (hypothesis).

slowly chess reputation as balanced game might have created a pressure toward needed the dice throw to lure people to play the game even is not first to play. That may have come with mobility rules and roles adjustment.

I read the first chapters of murray about chess ancestor, and prototypes rules that may have been preparing what we know now... point here. drawing may actually be desirable... and have been what has shaped the history of chess. Speculating on top of what i read.. as putting myself in some person being asked to play a new game from some remote town never seen played, while i could play throw dice without feeling duped, or some more established fair game.. (maybe some betting happening would even add more pressure)... not such a wild guess... to fill in the blanks....