Ok, so I've been gone a while and maybe rules have changed, or maybe I just don't get what's going on here... but what happened wiht this game? (https://www.chess.com/variants/4-player-chess/game/28147250/124/1)
I was second place with 33 points, the third place guy had 15 points, I got checkmated by the first place guy, and suddenly, bang, the game was over and third place had 35 points. And, no, he didn't checkmate the first place guy.
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Jul 12, 2022
0
#43
did you really reply to a 5 year old post to ask a question about your game?
When green resigned to claim the win, blue got 20 points for the resignation. 15+20=35
Yup, I really did 
It was the first post I found that seemed to be on point.
The interesting thing was that the game didn't say he resigned, it merely said he claimed the win. I didn't realize that that meant the other player would gain something. Seems odd to punish me for his claiming a win, but I guess now I know how that goes. I might have known that five years ago when I was helping administer.
MGleason a écrit :
It doesn't punish you so much as reward surviving players.
Well, I guess that is one way to look at it. By the time I was checkmated the other guy was so beat up he was basically a non-entity, so I'm not sure that 'survived' is the best way to describe him. It certainly is my policy to focus on the player that threatens me the most, and ignore non-players who are still alive (suppose he had just a king, for example!).
Almost totally off the subject, but have we ever considered ranking by whose pieces you took? So you would have a score against each player, including checkmate? Just thinking outloud here
MGleason a écrit :
Interesting idea - like the Sonneborn-Berger tiebreak system?
Well, I'm not sure. Just running the math through my head. The little chess pieces by the side of my screen made me think of it. I'm thinking you would have a score that looked like this:
Blue: 14
Yellow:12
Green: 3
Total: 29
Then... just thinking out loud here and, hey, give a shout out to the wife and kids for me... then you would have, at the end of the game, four totals. And the rule would be:
1: Highest total if 20 greater than anyone else.
1b Highest total if higher head to head score over second highest total
1c Tie if Highest total has lower head to head score over second.
After 1 or 1 and tie for one removed from rank then rinse and repeat for second place.
Ergo in order to clear win you have to:
1) Win by 20 over everyone or
2) Win by head to head over second place
A tie win would be one where second place had a higher head to head over you.
Would be interesting to evaluate a few games and see if that would lead to a 'fairer' end result.
icystun wrote:
Often the situation arises that two players are left and the 2nd (ranked 3rd at that moment) player can't catch up to the 1st player (me in this case) by a long shot. The 3rd ranked player however, is ranked a few points below the currently 2nd ranked on points. I just kept on playing for a bit to so that the 3rd ranked player would catch up. I could have claimed a win, but thought the other player should be rewarded for his fighting. It was nothing like teaming during the game, but once we were the only players left, I allowed the other player to catch up to 2nd by playing until this player reached the necessary points.
Would you (and the team) consider this acceptable? I got some pretty ugly threats following the game by PM, so I want this clarified.
I think that's manipulating the results of the match. It's game fixing. World Champions are supposed to set a good example for the other players. That is worse than playing teams in FFA. I'm shocked by this.
CheeseGT wrote:
You can't implement auto-claim, imagine this scenario:
Green is dead
Blue just dead right now
It's yellow turn and he has mate in three (or mate in one, or whatever) but Red has enough material to get the auto win.
What is the right thing to do there?
The right thing to do is take care of yourself first. Claim win.
Jul 17, 2022
0
#51
That kind of situation is why I'm personally not a fan of the rules as they currently stand. I don't like a situation where the players are left with the awkward ethical question of whether it's appropriate to reward an opponent for putting up a good fight or whether they should cut it off now and benefit someone who has been eliminated. Ideally the rules should be structured in a way where players don't even have an option one way or the other.
But I don't have a suggested rule change to eliminate the problem.
I guess I'm personally not a fan of the whole points system. But if you don't have points, FFA doesn't work since whoever attacks first loses...
Jul 18, 2022
0
#52
I've played some 3-player chess, with the rule that you are not eliminated until your king is captured, but whoever captures your king gains control of all your pieces.
Assuming blunders don't lead to an early elimination, the 3-way balance of power is critical. You can have the weakest position, but the second-weakest player needs to help you against the strongest player. This continues until you get into an endgame, where the winner ends up being whoever can best make the transition to the endgame.
Because of this, you can actually go all-out attack if you want. You'll weaken both yourself and your target, but so long as you stop your attack before you do too much damage, you and your initial target will then work together against the third player.
The four-player dynamic, without a points system, will be roughly the same once someone has been eliminated. Before the first elimination, though, it's totally different. People can afford to push an attack to the death on anyone who looks weak, since they then go into the three-way balance of power and it doesn't matter if they're weaker when they get there. This means that whoever attacks first and loses some material makes themselves a target for elimination. It also means that you might see the three lowest-rated players gang up on a single higher-rated player, or work together to eliminate whoever is doing well in a tournament.
So simply playing four-player without teams or a points system doesn't really work unless perhaps you can come up with an alternative rule set. I'm not a fan of points, but I don't have an alternative suggestion.
Jul 18, 2022
0
#53
Yeah, winner-takes-all is one way to solve it. Of course, that means that the guy who puts up a stubborn fight and barely loses is no better off than the guy who crumbles in the opening, but it makes unethical teaming and other forms of manipulation much less rewarding.
So... what if we hid the points?
Oh, they could. I tend to play 1/7 and anyone that manages to keep track of the score at that speed is welcome to their moral quandry. I was just thinking that for the mass of us it would encourage us to keep playing since we wouldn't know what place we were in or by how much. Played a game today, so caught up in it that it was late in the game when I looked up and was rather shocked by my score.
smrkdev, you are right. But if the "auto Claim Win" is optional then other players do not know if the 1st player has it enabled.