Stalemate needs to be abolished...

He had to find someone that would agree with him.

Another stalemate heartbreaker

lets say stalemate is abolished.....then what does it come next...?Making the queen move like a knight (plus her current moves), the rook go diagonally or imagine tha your king has a shield and is protected by all checks or mates....be serious...start winning games and stop blaming stalemate that you cannot win.....that's the rule for so many years....if u dont like stalemate then invent a variant of chess that will make u happy but leave the current rules as they are and stop trying to persuade us that stalemate needs to be abolished....

Everything you have just said has already been suggested in this thread. The main problem is that the OP doesn't care about it. He wants stalemate removed.

sorry for repeating things again but it is impossible to know every one of the 1500+ comments:P and i think the OP should exercise more at his endgames and stop complaining about stalemate,that's how the game is played ,if he doesn't like it he better start playing checkers which is simpler(no offence to checkers players)

How would changing the stalemate rule lead to any of those things?  Lets not find a cure for cancer because next doctors will be wanting to become serial killers.  Marvin is right when he says this thread is littered with all kinds of silly slippery slope arguments.

Equating the elimination of stalemate with curing cancer? Really...?

Considering Chess as representational of war (in historic times) then it makes perfect sense that the King is not 'taken' or 'captured'. 
When the other pieces are 'captured' , they are, in effect, killed. They may as well be thrown out the window for all the use they are. A 'captured' bishop can't bravely escape his 'captors' and return to the game; the piece ceases to exist once taken.
In war there was usually no need to kill the enemy king. All that was needed was for the enemy king's army to be beaten. The battle is fought, the enemy's defences overwhelmed or outflanked, and the King's possible death then becomes imminent and inevitable. The King, with nowhere left to turn, is thoroughly defeated. He then need only surrender, resign, abdicate, be exiled, whatever; even, literally, go into captivity. Death is not necessary and in fact killing the enemy King could even be detrimental: he would become a martyr and the cause for  future vengeance.
Napoleon Bonaparte is the perfect example. Even after escaping Elba and being again defeated (a hundred days later) he wasn't executed but instead exiled to the remote and far safer island of St Helene.

It's true that if you look at chess as a representation of actual warfare, Japanese and Chinese chess (both of which punish the stalemated) make more sense than western chess.  Likewise, it would also make more sense if pawns could move backwards, since turning 180 degrees and walking (or alternatively, just walking backwards) should be an easy task for most healthy human beings, even mere foot soldiers.

This is why the the argument "This is how it works in real life, therefore it should work similarly in the game" doesn't make a very good case for changing the rules of the game.  I understand what you're saying:  Stalemate = draw does indeed feel very paradoxical.  However, we can't really forget the fact that, as it stands now, chess is simply a two-player turn-based puzzle game.  It may have been inspired by medieval skirmishes or whatever, but that doesn't mean that it should dictate how the game should work today.

I don't understand why kens_mom bothered to quote what I'd written..?

I don't think "two-player puzzle game" describes the essence of chess.  It is in fact an abstract representation of battle and always has been.  It is however a game and not a simulation.  The difference is that a game puts the emphasis on playability, while simulation puts the emphasis on duplicating the realities of war even if it affects playability.  Personally I put the emphasis on playability, but I still prefer that the rules have some spirit of the logic of war.

Well, it used to be that combat consisted of marching big groups of foot soldiers in lockstep forward into contact with each other.  If you give them the chance to walk away from the enemy, a lot of them might run away.  Going backwards was desertion of duty (a shootable offense).  Higher ranking officers such as knights however could range all over the battlefield as they could be trusted not to desert.

In that case I suggest a player should be allowed to remove one or two pawns during a game. The actual move would be one step backwards after which the pawn will be taken of the board.

Algebraic notation could be something like 2.e4xe3d.d.

(where d.d. stands for desertion of duty of course)

I agree.  The issue is that changing the rules only for the sake of realism is something that most people would find disagreeable.  It's really too bad because a rule change like the one suggested by the OP would have been taken with much less contempt if it was proposed when the game was much younger and less established--when ideas of rule changes that had no merit in terms of gameplay and playability improvement (something like improving the atmosphere of the game, etc.) would have actually been taken seriously.

That's really interesting.  Thanks for letting me know.

With all due respect to Franklin Knowles Young, I think the military aspect of chess is far overstated. One can't say it was invented as a military or battlefield analogy because chess wasn't so much invented as evolved and the whys and whens are pretty much a mystery. The use of somewhat military terms can be nothing more than convenience and familiarity.  One could look HERE and see an entirely different take on the symbolism.

There can be little doubt that the original pieces of the Indian forerunner of chess represented the components of an Indian Army.

I doubt that that those who saw a different symbolism were unaware of the war analogy of chess or would deny it, but rather they sought to add a different level on which the game could be viewed symbolically.

Yes.

It would be wrong to mess with the stalemate rule, which results in a draw.  Even if you have overwhelming pieces it ought not count as a win in the event of a stalemate.  After all the enemy king remains alive and has the potential to fight another day.  Chess seems to reflect real old battle events.  It is not broken so don't try to fix it.

After debating this subject (or more like something similar) both here and on a couple of other forums, and both cedeing & claiming some points, the thing I now really have a hard time understanding is the strong defensive anger from many on the side not wanting even the suggestion of a possible change, let alone an actual attempt to make a change, which there never was. Nobody started petitioning FIDE, afterall. It's just a debate. A suggestion. Why the attacks? Why the aggressively defensive posture?

Jes curious. I thought the whole subject interesting, but I neither felt the need to get angry or attack anyone (unless attacked first; I don't always take the high road). And as I'm satisfied with a certain equilibrium in my mind on the subject, now I'm just left with curiousity over the emotions.