True or False Chess is a Draw with Best Play from Both Sides

I agree that after 1. e4  White does not really have a 0.64 advantage. 

It would be interesting to know the top engines' opinion of the magnitude of white's advantage on move 1.    My guess it is not much over 0.00. 

My experience is that most engines see White’s advantage as about 1/3 of a pawn, but Optimissed’s explanation seems more sensible.

Engines vary quite a bit in the initial estimate and from device to device. I recall that Stockfish 10 gave extra credit to the player on move, such that it’s evaluation of a White move was higher before it was played than after, because now it is Black’s move.

This database app for tablets embeds Stockfish. From the starting position, the engine’s evaluation ranged from .5 to .9. All too high.

What is best play ? There may be more than one best move in any given position . Can White or even Black for that matter force a win ? I suspect it would be a draw .

Melvin if you were able to look at all the possible chess moves in chess you will find that about 95% of those positions will have many "best moves".  In other words if one side is winning and it is his move--there will usually be several moves which retain the win. 

But as the posts in this forum suggest--there is a ton of evidence that chess is a draw with best moves for both sides.

Optimissed   NO! It does not have to be math proven that chess is a draw!! Checkers was known to be a draw before it was math proven,

I believe the ton of evidence given in  these forums proves chess is a draw. 

The earth revolved around the sun before it was proven that the earth revolves around the sun. People do not have to know something is true--for it to be true.

I believe the ton of evidence given in  these forums proves chess is a draw. 

oh pleez ! the tone of evidence given in these forums doesnt mean a/t. right now ?...chess appears from its exterior to be a draw but that may be disproven in the future.

The earth revolved around the sun before it was proven that the earth revolves around the sun. People do not have to know something is true--for it to be true.

...and if u believe that the earth revolved around the sun before there wuz consciousness ?...then ur being assumptive and therefore u dont know if that wuz actually true or not.

But checkers was provable by math, before it was proven by math. It's just that nobody had ever done it, until they did. There were guesses, just like there are guesses with chess.  Maybe chess is a draw, maybe it's a forced win. Nobody knows for sure right now.

There have been lots of things that were widely known to be true, based on a ton of evidence, until they were proven they weren't. That's why proof is so important. 

https://www.chess.com/blog/AmoghMaiya/daily-pawn-a-beginning-always-matters

That is likely the product of contempt. Try to turn it off (or put it to 0) and see if it still happens.

In principle yes, that doesn't imply we as humans are capable of doing so.

PATRIOT  Sorry but the strong checker players knew checkers was a draw before this was math proven. You may not like the fact that they knew checkers was a draw but never-the-less they did know it. There was a ton of evidence that checkers was a draw and that and their own experience was enough for them to know.

And, yes, I also know chess is a draw with best play and it does not matter that you say I don't know.

There are ways to prove things without using math proof.  It may never be proven that chess is a draw using math but there is enough other proof that chess is a draw.  If you do not accept the evidence that is fine but do not speak for me?

If chess was a guaranteed draw, why would anyone play it? There would be no point in playing. Noting would be learned because nobody would make a mistake

ZouDynatsy   To answer your question.  Chess is NOT a guaranteed draw for the average player or even the average GM. 

Chess is only a draw with best play for both sides. It is quite obvious that in 98% of over-the-board games the players are not able to do "best play" So over-the-board players have a lot of chess play left.

However in correspondence chess at the highest levels--this is a form of chess where some players can [with the aid of computers and other resources] play chess with no errors or "best play".  This is why you have strong correspondence chess players go for years without a single loss. This is also why at some future date the very best players will no longer play correspondence chess.

You had to use an engine to find the best moves tho... My brain hurts lmao

As far as the idea that not every possible position has been analyzed, that is, chess is not fully played out, one interesting way I thought of to counter this is to compare that to something like, how we don't need the entire universe mapped out to conclude that planets such as Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc., exist. We don't need to know about some galaxy 3 trillion light years away to make a conclusion about our solar system. It's a strange analogy I guess, but we could think of the solar system as a particular quality about the universe, that isn't really dependent on our specific knowledge about a huge percentage of that universe. So to go through all those far out galaxies to confirm a particular claim about the universe would miss the point, it would be looking at the irrelevant information about the universe.

And of course to understand what is or isn't relevant to the question would take a certain amount of knowledge about the subjects to which the question pertains. From what we understand about the solar system, it's not really dependent on what we find out about the other galaxies. If we discover some new galaxy, it wouldn't strike us that "oh, that must mean our solar system has totally different planets than we thought," or something like that -- it would be irrelevant. And people who know and understand a lot about chess can also probably have a good idea of what is relevant.

There is also the example I have brought up before about how there may be zillions of possibilities in a normal looking endgame position with an extra rook for White and, some pawns for both sides, kings, and nothing else, and yet, even though we can't come close to calculating every single variation, we can be quite confident that the side with the extra rook is completely winning (as long as there isn't some immediate tactic to win the rook or for Black to promote a pawn or something).

So yeah, to just argue that there are many theoretical possibilities doesn't really mean much. We just care about the meaningful ones -- meaning and relevance is pretty much the only reasonable way to get knowledge about just about anything if you think about it. There is an infinite amount of ways to write a sentence, but this doesn't seem to bog us down much because we only really care about meaningful ways to write a sentence. We might never know if a sentence with 57 googleplex commas and words in it will be useful in a chess book for example, but even though we can't empirically confirm that it wouldn't be a good idea as we can't actually try it, we can use our general understanding of writing to provide a reasonable claim about whether it would be good or bad. The amount of possibilities is just the canvas available to us, and isn't a big indicator of the qualities of something without context, and so it's not necessarily appropriate to use in an argument. (Or even more to the point... we don't need to get closer to infinity for infinity to be a valid concept... it has nothing to do with "how many numbers we know/don't know or have counted to")

I think the idea of "in science we used to be very confident that x was true, but then we discovered that y was true" is a bit of a separate argument from the mathematical one. I think one point is that with chess, we already define the rules in a particular way, whereas in science, as it relates to the real world, our models are not final and are just trying to represent the world as best we can; it is subject to change unlike the rules of the current version of chess (which is the subject being discussed). It's like when we found out that matter behaves not necessarily like a particle, but perhaps like a wave, or something like that. Or discovering quantum mechanics. This kind of fundamental thing wouldn't happen in chess, in chess, the equivalent would be like if we found positions where knights suddenly could move horizontally like rooks or something, it doesn't make sense because we already defined it for this not to happen, we didn't merely believe or predict that this will not happen. So our understanding of certain things like, a bishop always staying on the same color of square, will just by definition not change... there are certain things that we can consider somewhat fundamental, and although it is definitely a jump to go from bishops always being on the same color to, for example, knowing a certain rook up endgame is winning, it doesn't seem like an especially big jump in a case like that.

Elubas makes a good point. 

It could only not exist under the basic rules since 2017.

No one knows though,