Stalemate needs to be abolished...

lol

Here's why Monster won't say he favors stalemate as an automatic win - he can't get around the fact that the player delivering stalemate is responsible for creating the stalemate position and leaving his opponent without a legal move (and therefore should be punished)

But he won't say that he favors allowing the king to move into check and be captured because that's a much more radical change to the game and would create instances where a player could win while his king was being attacked, which is totally illogical though at least would be worth exploring

In the interests of saving time, here's Monster's response to #1

In other sports, players are rewarded for getting their opponent to violate the rules.

And my rejoinder: The other sports you've cited in the past (tennis and sumo wrestling) don't permit participants to *force* their opponents to violate the rules, where it's a 100 percent certainty that the player will violate the rules as is the case with stalemate. In other sports, the player may be likely to violate the rules, but his destiny remains in his hands. He still has hope, even if it's only a glimmer of hope. Hope is not completely snuffed out.

But you know, if you simplified chess by dispensing with check/checkmate rules and simply made it the object of the game to capture the enemy king, stalemate would be zugzwang for the stalemated player (his king would be captured next turn).

That's true, but I think chess would become kinda crude if the object were to capture the king and if the king were able to move into check. I think you're right that it would simplify chess but think simplification makes the game less interesting/appealing

One day Monsters view of the game may be, fit and working again.

I've always thought that your avatar was a dude wearing a hoodie, like that guy from Assassin's Creed.  I was a bit surprised when I looked at your profile.

Yeah, avatars can be fun that way (if nothing else it helps people remember you).

AC looks like scary stuff :( ...  though its easy to see how you made the connection, I must now challenge you to a duel for maligning my character thus!

It appears this thread has expired.

Long live stalemate as 1/2!

So it seems. On another site, I already admitted that the current rule has been acceptably effective for long enough, that it simply isn't going anywhere.

There, I wasn't calling for its abolition, but merely a scoring change of .75-.25, which may indeed have some far-reaching implications. We'll never know...unless someone has a silicon monster play itself in the variant for a year or so.

To my satisfaction, though, on a purely logical basis, the rule's illogicality was never refuted.

But, yeah, the thread is dead. Long live the thread!

The logic of stalemate as 1/2 is irrefutable lol

The player who delivers stalemate fails to accomplish the game's objective and is 100 percent responsible for leaving his opponent without a legal move.

To score such a result as +1, as the OP wanted, is absurd because it rewards a player who fails to achieve the game's objective as if he had achieved the game's objective.

To score it between 1/2 and 1 doesn't seem logical either because the player still didn't achieve the game's objective - you're just rewarding material superiority, which is never rewarded in chess, or you're rewarding a player who puts his opponent in a position where he's forced to violate the rules of the game for it to continue, which is also never rewarded in chess.

The only reason this thread survived as long as it did was due to the OP's refusal to admit that the player who delivers stalemate is 100 percent responsible for it. When he finally did, the thread expired after some cherrypicking and fruitless attempts to keep it alive

I'd say it's more accurate to say that the rule's illogiciality was never demonstrated, however the illogicality of the rule's abolition was also not conclusively demonstrated either.

That is to say, that while the proposed change isn't necessarily fundamentally flawed in some way, there's no compelling reason to make it.

It's fundamentally flawed because it rewards a player who fails to achieve the game's objective

But I repeat myself (and many others who made the same point hundreds of posts ago)

I think the argument is that under those rules stalemate would become a part of the game's objective, so doesn't do anything of the sort.

Ah, yes. The "secondary objective." The more someone tries to avoid responsibility for stalemate, the more the rules and nature of the game have to be changed. "It's not my fault my opponent can't move. He cornered himself and cramped himself! Errrr, I mean stalemate ought to be a secondary objective! Yeah, that's the ticket! I *meant* not to checkmate my opponent! And if I can't checkmate my opponent or stalemate him, why we'll make material superiority a third objective! Yeah! Anything to avoid responsibility!"

Well the problem stems from continuing to look at the proposed ruleset revisions from the perspective of the current rules.  I'm by no means arguing in favour of the change, but Monster, as churlish as he can be, does have a valid point when he says that it's not really valid to discard the new objective just because it's different than the old objective.

My issue, aside from questioning the validity of a number of the key arguments used to rationalize it, is that from the standpoint of what makes for a better game I fundamentally believe that counting stalelmate as a win cheapens the game significantly.  Wins would no longer need to be as definitive, minor disadvandages would be much more difficult to recover from and the beautiful balance that the game currently has would be upset.  In effect, much of the game's elegance would be lost.

The rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

Ha, true. Is there any other game where a player or team that fails to accomplish the game's objective is rewarded with a win for achieving a secondary objective? There may be, but I can't think of any. Wondering if this "secondary objective counts as a win" idea sets a precedent.

Why should we ever be responsible for our opponent's ability to make a legal move? Why should we ever have to keep in our minds our opponent's ability to continue? Why, in any true two-party *competition* should I ever have to *cooperate w/the opposition* to continue their ability to compete? Because that's what the current rule asks us to do. And don't use the circular "It's the rule" or "It breaks the so-called 'objective' rule" non-arguments to answer. The item of debate is whether the rule(s) *themselves* are logical. The OP contends that it breaks other rules, e.g., clock rules, but I'm just addressing as few items at a time as possible.

I totally agree that "doing away" with stalemate situations by allowing things like passed/double moves would change the game enough to definitely make it a variant, but my contention was that since the position is in no way equal to a mate/resignation/flag fall, but yet a *competitive show of dominance* due to my opponent's inability to continue (certainly similar to checkmate, though obviously not equal), that a score less than 1-0 & more than .5-.5 should be awarded, with .75-.25 an initial suggestion.

Many of the arguments counter to this rely on "this situation this" or "that situation that", relying on *perceived advantages/disadvantages* or *perceived good play/bad play*. Rules are not for adjudication; we adjudicate *on applied rules*. I realize there are example games for situations X, Y, & Z, but the final position remains the same: one player having made a legal move, then the other player being unable to, thereby being at a *competitive disadvantage*, surely *a loss* in most endeavors, but possibly acceptable as something between a full win and the current draw-score situation within our beloved game of Chess. Since we obviously can't allow illegal moves, and passed moves would make Chess "Not Chess", we're left with a scoring adjustment, perhaps .75-.25.

In threads on 2 other sites, I've already accepted 2 points:

1) The proposed scoring change *may* change the game enough to make it a variant and not an improvement. Data would need to be accumulated and analyzed to bear that, or its inverse, out.

2) That the current rule has survived long enough (approx. 120+ yrs.) to show an a popularis validity & acceptability, though the proposed score change *may* actually provide an improvement, again, without data, the deductions would be educated, at best.

I hadn't really planned on debating this any longer, as "people gets what people wants", regardless of any logic, but I did want to address what I feel is the anti-logic, anti-competitive nature of the current rule as I see it, and I was lucid & not hungover. 

As this is way long, Ima cut out here for now.