I stalemate a lot because I play against Computer and like to promote all my pawns before checkmating. They worked hard, they deserve the promotion. But that very often ends up with me accidentally stalemating the king when I'm not paying attention to him crying in the corner.
I think this is a good summary of the topic. No other comments are needed.
because dumb Europeans made it that way 100s of years ago for no reason. Before chess went to Europe a stalemated king was a loss. but some Europeans somewhere complained (probably the French since they complained about pawn double moves for no reason and made en passant exist as well) and ever since then chess has been a boring 99.999% draw rate game because Europeans in clearly lost positions with insufficient material to checkmate or even stalemate want to feel better about themselves and call it a "draw" even though by anyone operating with any kind of logic at all could tell you they lost the game, It would be like a military general losing all of his soldiers and then saying it was a "draw" no it wasn't you lost the battle lol. Same thing with repetition rules. before Europe if you repeated moves over and over you had to either do something else or resign the game. Basically chatarung or whatever was based AF but then Europeans came along and changed all the rules and no one wants to change the rules so I guess we will all have to wait until 99.999999999% of all top level games end in a draw before it finally clicks in these peoples brains that the rules suck and need to be changed back to how they were. No repetitions allowed. No stalemate = Draw, and go back to a Bare King = Loss then chess winrates will dramatically climb and games will be more interesting.
Would you get rid of all those other silly European rule changes? Pawns moving two spaces on their first move is one of those European innovations. So is letting pawns promote to a piece when they reach the eighth rank--before that they were just stuck there. And bishops would only be able to move two spaces along the diagonal. And is having the queen move only one square (or choose to move two their first time) something you'd like to bring back?
If you don't like modern European chess, there are places you can play old-fashioned chaturanga. Or perhaps you can invent a new game with only the chess rules you like and try to persuade everyone to play it.
Stalemate being a draw is easily the worst rule of chess.
"Ah, nice game. You have outplayed me so thoroughly that I have nothing but my king left. Not only that, but no matter where I move it to you would be able to capture it on your next turn. You have proven your superiority in this game.
Let's call it a draw."
If stalemate becomes a win then the rules on sufficient mating material (when your opponent flags) also ends up changing. One player lost everything but the king and never captured anything. Currently, if the opponent flags it is a draw. With stalemate being a draw then if the opponent flags the lone king would win because there is a legal way for that bare king to win (the opponent gives away everything but the king and an h pawn, moves the king to the promotion square and then starts moving the pawn while the opponents king moves to the last two squares on the f file (boxing in the h file queen. Eventually the pawn moves one square from the promotions square that the king occupies and the opponent moves the king to the other of the two last squares on the f file, inflicting stalemate. It would be interesting to see the reactions to lone king victories.
I almost feel like you should be allowed to play those last 2 moves and ACTUALLY capture the king to finish the game. Which in turn would have to remove the rule that if the king is in check, you MUST deal with it. But really, if the king is in check, and you choose not to deal with it, you are basically choosing to lose, so i see no problem with that removal.
This is very simple to understand.
To win a game of chess, you have to capture the king.
In a stalemate position, both kings stay alive, so nobody loses.
And since there are no more legal moves the game cannot continue.
Both kings stay alive.
The logical derivative is a draw.