Stalemate: what NOT to do

I greet you fellow human, welcome to yet another blog by the one and only @IceConeDragon. I am also greeting @ChocoCaramelPawn for the next 5 blogs. So you should also check out HIS blog channel as well as mine. Press here for Choco's blog channel, click here for my blog channel and click here for cheese. The reason I am mentioning @ChocoCaramelPawn is because he guessed my middle name so now his name will be in the next few blogs of mine. But without further ado, welcome to the amazing world of stalemate. but hold on, the origin story calls. And it's calling of the last time because I amn't really bothered to write about the same story all over again. 

So a few weeks ago fellow blogger @VOB96 made a forum about what footballer are you based on your blogging with a ranking going from number 1 to whatever last place was. Of course being the curious human I am, I applied. "How bad can I get myself down the list?" I thought to myself. At the time, only 28 other people had applied for the ranking. And after the ranking had been fully updated with all the names, I was in dead second-last. You may be thinking, "oh suck it up you stupid buffoon, better than last". To where I say, you are wronger than pineapple on pizza. I needed to get back on the list, but how? How could I score so high when I had hit so low. I needed to write better blogs, but what was the problem? I thought. I did know that my blogs had to be longer, and by longer I mean MUCH longer. But luckily there was also a description saying that I needed to focus more on chess. To be fair she is kind of right. I haven't done any chess related blogging in a while. And by that I mean a LONG time. About 20 blogs ago. I think I may be under exaggerating with everything. So I started the What NOT series. But I should shut up about my backstory, I'm not batman of course. So how did the stalemate rule come to the chess world, and what WOULD the chess world be without it? Discover now. But before I need to distract you with something else.

                                                              OTHER ORIGINS

We actually don't know who created this rule, all we know is that it descended from the original game, now I feel like I let some readers down, but to cheer you up lets read the...

                                                                    ACTUAL ORIGINS

The stalemate rule began in the early forms of chess. Like Chaturanga, which surprisingly, you can still play in the variant sections. Except its four player, and you only get 8 pieces. click on this magical link to reach the magic of chaturaji. Yeah I know, its not Chaturanga, but its close enough and its just Chaturanga but four player. but what happened if stalemate were to happen in the old olden days. Well, playing stalemate back in the old times of chess was even more unfortunate for the person playing it then it would be now. Back when stalemate wouldn't have meant an immediate draw, the person who was put into stalemate would've been the immediate winner of the game. So how would the world have been if the rule was never changed to a draw in the 1800s? Well, first of all, any games that were very important like championship games that ended in stalemate could've secured an entirely different generation of world champions. So let's see how a match between Victor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov. 

So actually, while I was putting together the game. I made a mistake near the end so on move 120 go to the alternative move instead. This game was suspiciously long. And the play in the game was really stupid. Why didn't Korchnoi promote his pawn? Well, I actually have a theory on why that might be. Apparently this was the first ever stalemate in a championship match. Or at least I think it was. It was the first stalemate of something nonetheless. Could it have been to get fame for being the first ever to get stalemate. But before we can see how this game would've gone in stalemate was still as it was, we need to review the game as it is, starting with the...

Brilliant moves: =0 =0

Great moves: =25, these include moves 50, 55, 59, 65, 68, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106 and 107.  =4, these include moves 38, 45, 49 and 54.

Best moves: =29, these include moves 13, 15, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 56, 60, 63, 64, 69, 72, 82, 83, 84, 88.  =57, these include moves 13, 16, 17, 20, 22, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 107, 111, 115, 116.

Mistakes: =3, these moves include 39, 49, 51. =2, these moves include 50, 74.

Miss: =0. =3, these moves include 40, 52, 55.

Blunder: =1, this move is move 53. =0.

Actually it wouldn't have mattered much if the rule had still applied as Karpov still won. But how the games went could have influenced people in many different ways and there could have been an entirely different generations of Grandmasters and world champions. Because every single decision ever has a consequence. If it's just from killing a fly to winning one single game of chess. If you want to learn more on the multiverse, click here. And now that this section of the blog is over, we will move onto the bot experimentation. This bit used to be where I saw how many bots I could beat using one of the what NOT openings. But now since the we are doing stalemate and that isn't some sort of opening, I am changing up the rules, now I am seeing how fast I can stalemate these bots and give an analysis on how common stalemate is. But to start this all off, we are playing the lowest rated, Martin...

So pushing to my extreme limits, I was able to get rid of most of Martin's pieces than checkmate him in good time, only 39 moves, so far the average amount of moves it takes to stalemate a bot on chess.com for me is 39. Taking his pieces was the difficult part as we traded queens really early in the game. But my bishop was able to do most of the work so It wasn't really that difficult. Getting him into stalemate was the easiest part, mainly because there are only 2 parts and this one was more straightforward. Getting the pawn promoted was a breeze since there was nothing stop it from promoting. And I used the classic stalemate to finish off the game. And next up we have the 400 elo bots. This game is the second in a game of Juan on Juan's. (Sorry I just really felt the urge to pull that joke again.

So this game was harder to pull off stalemate with since my opponent still had his queen to freely move around with, but my queen also kind of swept the board so not much can be said about that. At least no pawn promotion was required to beat Juan, and he seemed a bit less annoying that game, but sooner or later he'll be back to his own annoying self and start to troll me some more. The next bot is one with 550 elo, surprisingly easier to beat then Martin for me, and I will make sure that this bot really does get No-L. (Yes sadly that was another one of my puns. I think I may have an addiction to making them).

I feel like the main reason this took me longer to do was because I wasn't even paying that much attention to the game itself, I did lose a queen out of just being braindead at that exact moment which didn't really help the move counter. But if you count overall it isn't really that long, when you compare it to the 124 move analysis at the top. If we count up all of the numbers we've gotten and divide it by how many numbers were added together, we get 42 r2 which rounds up to 43, which is now the average amount we jumped 4 since the last time we counted. I you want to learn how I did that sum and how I found an average AND want to learn long division, click here. The second last bots we will be facing for this blog is going to be the 700 elo bots, will these bots be difficult or will the average go down? 

Yes, it actually did, the average is now 40, which means it is only 1 higher than the original score, and of course I have to pull up the same stalemate for the third time in a row. It's just a classic killer. Overall, this blog holds a massive move counter of 284 moves recorded into this singular blog, imagine if I had to set all of that up in one singular screen of chess board. It already took me 20 minutes to record and copy on the game that lasted 124 moves, but anyway, now that we are closer to the end of the blog, we get on the lighter side of things, but I don't feel like doing that JUST yet... because there is still one more game left to play. Hopefully we can get the counter even lower, I don't know.

So the number never actually changed one tiny bit, and I am certain that this is true because I did all the math correctly, but enough about that because the grand total of moves in this blog is a massive 324 moves, yes I am certain that there is some kind of blog out there with 1000 moves but I don't care about that, because what I care about was that I was able to supply this blog to the people who are reading this blog right now. I had to promote 3 times! That has to be embarrassing, sometimes I feel like some bots are just programmed to always lose, they could be winning by a massive margin and then just screw everything up! But again when you say it like that it also sounds like us. We all make mistakes.

                                                                    CONCLUSION

Well, this blog is a very special blog because I am proud to announce that I have reached 1,000 views on my account! Which is a good amount by the way. I also found it very cool to make this blog for people who actually enjoy reading blogs, or for people don't have anything better to do with their lives and just feel like reading, I hope that you stick around for even more of my blogs. And who knows, maybe I could inspire some other player to become a blogger. This isn't about blogging, this is about chess. And this blog isn't about stalemate. "We all make mistakes, but we learn from them"