King + two knights vs king, always an automatic draw?

here's the crux of the matter:  staff has decided there are more important issues to focus on;  never in my life have i had a situation like this occur, so i'm inclined to agree with them about it.     🙂

you also admitted it hasn't happened to you...

The point you are missing is that you can not say "if Black takes" and call it "forced".

I don't generally think that small but fixable issues should be ignored just because there are more important ones. With that mindset, every chess site would be in pretty bad shape. But let's agree to disagree on this one. I appreciate that you pointed out the problem of flagging the opponent, which makes a lot of sense!

What I’m sure of is that FIDE rules consider this not a draw, and USCF rules consider this a draw. And yeah chess.com follows USCF rules.

Look, mate, I don't know how to explain it any clearer than I already have. Maybe you should just read the thread more carefully. Everyone else seems to understand what I'm talking about. Let's just give it a rest, ok?

Well, I know what "forced" means and I know the difference between "two knights" and "two knights plus a bishop". At least I have that going for me.

I could be wrong, but I think that in a case like this FIDE would use an arbiter to decide whether to continue the game or declare it a draw.

I’m not really sure about those sort of things, but I got the information here: https://support.chess.com/article/128-what-does-insufficient-mating-material-mean

“In the specific case of two knights versus a lone king, USCF rule specifies that the game is drawn because there is no forced mate. The FIDE rule specifies that the game is drawn only when there is no possible mate, and so would not include two knights vs a king as an automatic draw, since it is technically possible to checkmate the king if the king 'helps' you by making specific moves to allow the checkmate. However, Chess.com follows the USCF rule in this case, and calls two knights insufficient mating material because the checkmate can not be forced.”

The site would have to run an analysis on every case of a timeout that triggers an insufficient material check.

That would take server resources to run the engine long enough to find the mate and there would only be one in a very small percentage of games. 

For FIDE, it would be a win if mate is possible by any series of legal moves. The player just has to show the possibility; the arbiter doesn't have to make a judgement call at all.

And then you'd have all the tree huggers mad at you for using too much energy to run that analysis. Then the "forced mate with only two knights" crowd would say no cost is too high. the credibility of chess itself is on the line.

I agree with Gomer and Technical. It might be possible in some ultra rare circumstance, but it just doesn't matter. I've had one single K vs. KNB game in my lifetime. They say the average is two per lifetime. But I'll bet the average number of times someone comes across a K vs. KNN forced mate is zero.

Okay, maybe so. I just wanted to know what was behind this decision. Understandable, but still a bit unfortunate.

If black doesn't take the bishop, it's not a king + two knights vs king situation; it's a king + two knights + bishop situation, so the rule concerning insufficient material to force a mate doesn't apply. But if black takes, the situation would be K+N+N and mate in one. I would call that pretty much forced, and that's what the rest of us are trying to talk about here.

Well then I guess they need to change the rules to suit your smarmy style of play.

What on earth are you talking about? Nothing in this thread has anything to do with anyone's "style of play". You seem to be completely missing the point of this whole discussion – as did quite a few others who, for some unknown reason, wanted to share their views without understanding the original question. I simply made an observation that surprised me, and I just wanted to understand the reason behind this rule. So I asked, and I think one or two people were able to give a reasonable answer. Case closed.

Before requesting code changes, test the scenario which is described. It might be that it's already handled.

I'm not requesting anything. I only wanted to understand the reason behind this rule. That's all.

I got flagged for a draw with 2 knights, and a time advantage. Then I ended up getting mated a few games later with only two knights. UGH.

https://www.chess.com/game/live/77139123031

https://www.chess.com/game/live/77158897397

Chess.com has its own rule tailored for speed chess and for simplicity. To differentiate all the cases where a player has a forcing line from those where it's trivial to avoid Checkmate would would be incredibly computationally expensive. Furthermore it requires some form of judgement on what is consideree trivial. The two knights cases only scratch the surface of the general problem. FIDE and USCF each have different rules to handle these cases and I suspect they are difficult to enforce consistently. Positions have been discovered where a forcing line exceeds 500 moves.