I hate the threefold repetition rule

Not all repetitions involve checks. It could be a perpetual threat, defense..etc, what if both players are making threats when they repeat? And if a player is able to be caught in a repetition, why should they be referred to as "winning" in the first place? Chess is about position, not the number of pieces. Also what if the perpetual checker is winning?

Take this position for example:

White is winning, but let's say for whatever reason white was stupid enough to think he was losing, so he tried 3 fold repetition, are you saying white should lose this game?

It's also important not to confuse drawISH positions with DRAWN positions: Here,

There is no need to worry about repetition because the game is over, as there is no possible way to either way to achieve checkmate or stalemate by any move. No 3 fold, no 50 move rule, no insufficient materiall.ect, the game is drawn, over, finished, end of discussion.

A better example:

Black cannot win this game by any means, so even if white is dumb and ends up doing perpetual checks because he doesn't know Q v K endings, how could white lose?

I am actually not that a great player, but am good at tactics, logic, and endgames. Another thing I need to add is that inevitable repetition is not the only way a game could be DRAWN.

Even if white takes the bishop, there is still no theoretical way to win. It might take thousands of moves for a repetition to occur, but it doesn't matter because neither side can win by any move ever, so it's a draw. I like to consider positions like this a "gentle stalemate" because that is essentially what it is, and any legal moves are useless.

You need to picture this :

If your opponent can get a draw by threefold or another kind of draw...............

You were never beating him by any stretch of the imagination.

ps. points are not and never have been part of the scoring in a chess game. You can win or lose or draw...thats it.

It's like saying black should win this game..

In FIDE terminology, positions like these are dead, no checkmate is possible by either side. According to the FIDE laws, they are immediate draws. IMO, they are even draws when you resign or your flag falls, but do not sign the scoresheet with that score! What you sign up to prevails over what actually happened in the game. The reason is that the game already ended and you cannot resign or lose a game that is not running (unless you sign for it)!

Another law says that you cannot lose on the clock when your opponent cannot checkmate you even if you cooperate. I call that half-dead, because it is exactly 1/2 of a dead posiiton.

Agreed, and I would actually classify them as insufficient mating material, as the current material on the board is not enough to force mate. Dead is appropriate.

"Insufficient mating material" is a dangerous term and abused by the chess.com website. It only looks at material balance and not at help-moves leading to checkmate. But the FIDE-law is very restrictive with regard to dead positions!

Agreed, because positions like this

are a win for white if black lost on time by a matter of half a second. Not that they shouldn't be, but it is not a drawn position.

You did pose an interesting question. But you also answered your own question. You asked what the rule accomplishes. The rule accomplishes one of the fundamental purposes of chess, to penalize mistakes. The capture rule and checkmate rule also penalize mistakes.  I think as you progress you will see how valuable this rule is. 

I have never heard anyone suggest that "the player making the same repeated checking moves should lose". That's a first. I dont understand how that idea furthers the purpose of the game of chess. If the player who checks should lose, why run from the check? That may open up a whole new area of strategy and tactics though, where getting your king attacked is a winning idea and the person who delivers the check loses.

Yes, indeed! Expose your king on (but not over) the brink of being checkmated and your opponent must back off to avoid the repetition loss. A paradoxical outcome that turns the whole game of chess on its head. I was about to compose a problem on that theme, but now that you identified it, I'll spend my time in a more rewarding way

Repetition rule being a loss (or win) would mean checkmate would not even have to be possible. The guy being checked could only have a king and win the game LMAO

The fundamental flaw in his argument was that the player who's repeating moves is losing. But regardless, it still doesn't make any sense to say someone intelligently saving the game should lose.

 Another weird consequence! You can always recognize an insanity by the insanities it breeds!

And also contain redundancy. The stalemate rule should have been excised when the dead position rule was introduced.

Not sure this is 100% true. In an algorithmic context you would need to specify that the game ends in 'stalemate' conditions to keep machines or humans from looping while seeking for a legal move. You often see newbies confused when they have not been told about stalemate postions. When the stalemate end is decided, the dead rule can take care of the draw-assignment. You might think that the dead evaluation requires no knowledge of game-ends because it looks at the position on every move, but it is a look-ahead function and needs to know about the 'discontinuation' of stalemate positions even before they happen or it may start looping itself. A clever computer programmer can code around the recognition of stalemates but only if he is aware of them and their status.

And as you know the stalemate rule will never be cancelled in standard chess since it is part of the cultural heritage. Would make us all very .

The FIDE laws are regrettably imprecise in many ways (the most glaring being that it is nowhere stated explicitly and unambiguously that a player may make moves with only his own pieces).

That said on any reading both rules explicitly end the game:

art.5.2.1 ... The game is said to end in ‘stalemate’. This immediately ends the game ...

art.5.2.2 ... The game is said to end in a ‘dead position’. This immediately ends the game ...

There are certainly difficulties stemming from FIDE both defining "legal move" in the handbook and also using it in its normal sense, but from a common sense reading of arts 5.2.1 and 5.2.2, stalemate is just a dead position (and one with the shortest look-ahead).

The rules are:

If as stipulated in art.5.2.1, the player to move has no legal move, there can be no series of legal moves from that position and a fortiori no series of legal moves with which either player can checkmate his opponent's king. The position then satisfies the conditions of art.5.2.2.

The loop seeking legal moves you refer to is quite a small finite loop, so I don't follow your argument at the moment. I don't think a programmer would need to be clever to cope with stalemate. Coping with the dead position rule is a different matter. While there's obviously an effective procedure in the sense of mathematical logic for determining if a position is dead it's less obvious that there is a practical procedure for this in all cases and FIDE doesn't suggest one. (In any case I'm all in favour of allowing humans to play the game. I know computer programs can often play very well, but I don't think they get much enjoyment from it.) 

On the other hand humans have the same problem with the dead position rule. For example suppose the following position arises in a FIDE regulated tournament game and one of the players (presumably Black) then resigns.

The arbiter has to decide what the result of the game is. If the PC at the time is 139 or less then the result is certainly a win for the opponent of the player who resigns (by the moves shown). But what if the PC is 140 (stranger things have occurred)? Is that still the case or is it a draw under the dead position and 75 move rules? Keeping track of this must be a headache for the arbiter as well as the computer programmer. The position shown is reasonably simple. I'm sure it could get much more complicated. Indeed I've already simplified it because you also have to take into account the mandatory five fold repetition rule which could alter the length of the quickest helpmate from the position, so it could still be a draw with a PC of 139.

As for stalemate being part of our cultural heritage, it could be argued that insufficient material also was. That rule was excised. If the stalemate rule were excised people would still use the term stalemate, as they presently still refer to insufficient material.  We would be just as .

I definitely agree that it is very hard to evaluate the deadness of a position as explained in my previous post and by your example. In the world of chess composition it is even more complicated because of the uncertainty on histories. I had some discussions with Andrew Buchanan on the topic and I'm sure they will be resumed at some point.

I also agree the FIDE rules are regrettably imprecise on many accounts. What applies to deadness, also applies to checkmate and even stalemate! To evaluate checkmate you need to ascertain that the opposing king can be captured at all times. But capturing the king and the preceding self-checking move are illegal to execute so how to interpret the rules? FIDE tried to resolve it by forestalling the idea of "capturing the king" by "attacking the king". And when you ask what "attacking the king" means you end up with "the option to capture the king when it does not move" and we are in the hole in my bucket dear lisa again. There are safe roads out of this mess but FIDE has chosen to communicate in a semi-informal human range. It's called You know what I mean. Most of the time I do and I am willing to accept their imperfections. But there are also real issues thrown into doubt by the informal phrasing and they should be queried.

Interestingly, "insufficient material" is not in my culture at all. I always avoided it and raised my eyebrow when somebody used it. It is sort of an vague phrase requiring clarification whenever it is used. I am not sure when and where it was in the rules but certainly not without an arbitrary case list of sorts (until deadness took over). "Insufficient material" is not nearly as generic and precise as stalemate which existed before anyone started drawing up internationally agreed laws of chess. Probably even more important, the stalemate condition required immediate resolution in any era or nobody would have known what to do next, whereas "insufficient material" never needed distinction from "sufficient material without enforcable path to victory". These are relatively recent competition distinctions which have lead to abuses by organizations like USCF.

A clever programmer as intended is not someone with a great ability to encode complicated algorithms but someone who can recognize and code common principles underlying different concepts - in casu deadness and stalemate. The minute special contribution of stalemate (as game terminator) is easy to slip in because it only requires skipping code and knowing what to do next. I could argue that deadness itself is redundant because it can be compiled from 2 equal portions half-deads (also in the rules, not under that name) with a similar minute adaptation to assure "immediate execution". I won't do that because concepts like stalemate, dead and half-dead are separated in the heads of people. Programmers don't care. They would almost certainly use the half-dead modules as a basis for assigning "deadness" to positions - once they assemble the courage to tackle the issue instead of cheaply and illegally escaping to "insufficient material".

A reasonable chess player can in practice always see if a position is dead. So FIDE simply doesn't need to give a procedure. It is even hard to compose a position in which you can't easily see that the position is dead or not.

And I don't think it matters how many moves are required to checkmate. The rules explicitly say in any series of legal moves. They don't mention the 75 move rule.