Round 11: Another Draw

I wonder if people still think this is exciting

I wonder how many people think the world championship should be determined by a cheap and cheesey speed chess game?

Speed chess is not real well played skillful chess.

I think Carlsen-Caruana speed chess would be pretty skillful.

Speed chess is a poor excuse for a Chess game!

if this match is a draw in game 12, they might as well give the title to carlsen...caruana is horrible in any type of quick chess. this illustrates how ludicrous the format is for a tiebreak..they are using a type of game that was not used, in order to get to the championship in the first place

Well, I've suggested a way to avoid going to speed chess. To make it harder for players to draw:

If you stalemate the other player, we'll give you the benefit of an 0.6 - 0.4 split of the point. That's only 1/5 as good as a checkmate, so it won't spoil all the endgame theory about not blundering into a stalemate.

But stalemate is almost as hard as checkmate to make, so let's not stop there.

Perpetual check - an old draw condition, one particular case of repetition, where one player can endlessly check the other - shows a dominance of the board. So for that, let's split the point 0.51 - 0.49.

That's only a tenth as good as stalemate, so surely no one can complain!

And if that isn't good enough to make it very difficult to have a completely dead draw... there was also the historic winning condition of Bare King. However, it's dangerous to encourage materialism and discourage sacrifices.

So I decided on the following rule...

When one player captures the last of the other player's pieces except for the King, then on his next move, he may, if he chooses, replace one of his pieces other than his King with a Pawn. If he does so, he can only win with a checkmate, and the points will be split 0.501 - 0.499 in his favor.

I think this will do little violence to chess, and it reduces draws even with players still given time to think when they move.

Who said I did? Just saying their blitz chess would be pretty skillful. Better than any of our long games.

All those who think that the world championship should end in the next decade. No signs of a winner in classical guess if we want a world champion in a reasonable time scale (without giving draw odds to the champion, don't give Carlsen another excuse to go for draws) it's the only option. Is it perfect? No. Is it a reasonable choice given the current situation (money doesn't grow on trees)? Yes.

For all those who don't understand basic oratory technic I don't believe it would take a decade to get a winner, it is called hyperboly. But it would take ages.

Repetition does not show dominance. A lot of repetitions are forced by the worse of player to avoid a loss.

Chester618 sums it perfectly!

why decide a classical chess format with a speed chess format.when we are trying to determine who is better at classical chess.

they should play 21 games someone is bound to win during that time period

Got 3 million dollars to pay for it?

if they don't have cowinners of the tournament

Yes, it's true that one way to force a draw, and avoid being checkmated, is to bring about threefold repetition.

But what I'm proposing wouldn't really change that: if the repetition that was forced was perpetual check on the part of the player threatened with checkmate, he would get 0.51 - 0.49 instead of 0.5 - 0.5. Which isn't as good as 1 - 0 by a long shot.

And if the rules are changed, obviously the players would adapt, and it would still be the better player that is more able to use the pieces to bring about a desired outcome. So in general, the better player will still be the one to win, not the worse player.

My intent is this: after the change, just like before, the players would move their pieces so as to obtain positional and material advantage. Whether or not they succeed at this, of course, depends on how well both players are playing.

But once the situation on the board becomes less complex, and there is no longer much chance of the balance being changed, the players will now have more options than to go for a checkmate - if they can - or accept that the game is drawn. If only a lesser advantage is realized, then a player can choose to claim what it is possible to achieve with that lesser advantage. The points awarded, though, will be much less than for checkmate; so the outcome will be very close to a draw by comparison.

Of course, as the saying  goes, "a miss is as good as a mile"; so in the last game of an otherwise tied match, a win by 0.002 points is just as much a win as a win by 1 point.

But in the earlier games, the differences in point values are very much significant. Winning by .002 point when you could have won by 0.02 point, or 0.2 point, or 1 point, would be a bad mistake - because then in the next game, your opponent could perhaps easily win by enough of a margin to make your win insignificant.

Making a stalemate a 0.6 - 0.4 score doesn't invalidate all the endgame theory about checkmating where possible, and not blundering into a stalemate instead. What it does is add an additional level of theory about achieving stalemate when nothing better is possible.

This is why I think I have proposed something that will achieve this result: the players will still enjoy normal time controls, they will still pour a lot of thought into each move... but now the games will in many cases drag on longer, as there will still be fractional points to fight over when they would formerly have been drawn.

And because the lowest of those points can be achieved with a small advantage, it's much less likely that a tie will be the result in the end.