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

TetsuoShima    There are lots of openings where White wins quite a bit more than Black. But in all those openings White does not win 50% of the games.

White wins more than Black in most openings because White has the advantage of the first move and this puts more pressure for Black, rather than White, to make a mistake.  

I would agree that white has a slight advantage, but there is likely at least one move that forces a draw for every postion that white could force black into.

Sapiendust  you point to some very rare positions which were previous thought to be draws but are actually wins.  Even in the 6 piece and 7 piece endgames these positions are quite rare. 

But you take from this that sometimes even experts are wrong about "things they pretty much all agree on."  Do you really believe that all these chess experts had agreed these positions were drawn?  I would guess more than 98% of  experts had not even seen these positions.

But, in any event, that sometimes experts can be wrong can apply to almost anything.  Sometimes experts can be wrong about evolution.

Sometimes experts can make a math mistake.  Does this in any way indicate that evolution or math is wrong?

You do not need to point out a very difficult chess position to show experts can be wrong--just look at chess games lost by experts and masters and grandmasters and supergrandmasters.

I may be wrong but I think you alude to the opinion of almost all grandmasters that chess is a draw and you use the table base example to show even grandmasters can be wrong?  If so, we have acknoledged that what they think about chess being a draw is only an opinion in the first place. 

Also very few grandmasters have even seen those positions in the table bases.

Chess is the visible result, the transposition from mind to the physical world....We pit our wits,some are better than others,we try not to make mistakes.  Surely a beautiful mind does not exist! 

Yeah, I have the same username there. I love the tactics on that site. Too bad it doesn't get more attention. I expect chess.com will have 20 million "members" before chessity has 20,000.

ponz, my position is that those Q+P vs Q endgames are an example of something that is beyond the comprehension of all unaided human minds, and we don't know what else will turn up with continued progress in the tablebases. I'm not using that as evidence that GMs are wrong, but as evidence that chess can quickly get so complex that human beings (and even computers without a tablebase) have little hope of evaluating such positions accurately.

If positions with 5 pieces and the smallest material difference can have such hidden complexities and surprises, it should make us pause and be a little less than absolutely certain that the initial position with 32 pieces doesn't contain some even more striking surprises.

I think it is very likely that is a draw, but it's not something we should have as much confidence in as, for example, the statement that the sun will rise tomorrow. It isn't 100% certain that the sun will exist tomorrow (in essentially the same form) and the Earth will still be orbiting it as currently, but it's close enough to not be worth quibbling over or asking people to be more precise and quantify their probability estimate as 99.999% plus some additional number of 9s. I don't think chess being drawn is in that same category in terms of how little doubt it is rational to have.

Congrats on being Chessity's number one champion. All I ever do on that site is route planner.

Thanks, but I think that's a bit of a silly category they have on the leaderboard. The "champion" measure is mostly a matter of whether you have 100% activity or not: you get 5% activity per day if you do at least 20 problems, so if you've done that every day for the last 20 days, you have 100% activity and will be high up on the 'champion' board. My tactic rating is not very high compared to lots of others on that site, but the serious players who have much higher tactics ratings than me must not train at least 20 problems a day.

Sapientdust  I do not think that your example of some positions which cannot be evaluated by humans except with table bases applies to the initial position at all.

All of the first 5 moves by both sides have been looked at in the initial position and they are not similar to the examples you give and also there is no sign at all that there is a position which is part of a forced sequence leading to a win.  

In other words the examples you gave were positions rarely looked at and evaluated.  The initial position and many moves after this has been evaluated for hundreds of years.

If there was a forced win from the initial position it should start to be obvious by the 7th move for each side.

ponz, I don't know why it would necessarily start to be obvious by the 7th move for each side.

It could be that White just maintains his normal edge, and this is enough for him to eventually win a pawn many, many moves later, and that pawn might be sufficient to win against all defenses. It wouldn't actually be just one line, of course. We'd be talking probably about many such lines where White has his normal small advantages, but perfect play might be able to exploit those for a guaranteed win with best play in no more than 1081 moves, for example.

The point is that such things are possible despite how the starting position looks, and despite the beliefs (which I share) that White's advantage isn't enough for a win unless Black makes a mistake.

Sapiendust   It is possible.[in the sense that anything is possible]  However if there were such lines, somebody would have discovered one of them by now,  For sure, a chess engine would have discovered one of  the lines. Even I would have discovered one of those  lines. 

I believe chess is a forced win for whichever pieces I happen to be using that particular game.

It is very ambitious to say this. I have never seen a GM or an engine find a mate in 50 moves (without using a tablebase), so it's not so obvious that we would have already found a winning line for white if it existed. As far as we know, such a line might be a 90 move tactic that wins a pawn, leading to a won endgame, with many different variations depending on how black responds.  Also, nothing says this line contains only logical moves. Maybe it involves moving the same pieces multiple times in the opening, which we intuitively think is bad, but would turn out to be very good if it could force a win.

My point is that there many reasons why there could be a winning line that nobody has found. And this idea is backed up by the fact that we already know positions where there is a winning line that nobody had found before the advent of tablebases. It's not obvious that the initial position should be in the "easy positions" category. It might turn out to be one of those positions that we think is a draw and turn out to be a very complicated win.

Tronchenbiais  The idea that the winning line for White or Black [from the initital position] could be the not logical idea of moving pieces several times in the opening goes against what we know from thousands of top players over more than 200 years.  

Moving a piece or pawn multiple times and unnessarily in the opening is just a mistake and no amount of speculation is going to change this.

We have speculation that there might be a 90 move tactic that does not seem logical but wins a pawn and then the game. All, I can say is as you progress in chess you will realize there is no such thing from the opening position. This to happen falls under the "anything is possible" category.

It is more likely we will have a man walking on Venus in the next week than for this to happen.

The example you give is extreme. I didn't say white should only move the same piece all game long and try to get a win. There are a lot of opening lines where a side or the other moves the same piece twice (maybe not consecutively). There are also lines where it is not necessarily bad to bring the queen out early (I think), even though it is considered a bad thing in general.

Of course it goes against all our chess experience, and that is precisely why a winning line for white would be so hard to find : because it would be against what we think is logic in chess.

If you think it is crazy to think that, or that it's just not knowing enough about chess, then I answer you should look again at these winning Q+P vs Q endgames. The 6-men tablebase is available online, what you should try to do is enter a position with Q+P vs Q that is mate in 30 or whatever, and then try to solve it. In most case even a strong engine (not using a tablebase) can only draw these positions. The fact is we don't understand them. What we think is logic about endgames just does not apply in those cases, because they are too complex to be solved using simple human ideas.

Just a brief remark : my point is not that you should play the same piece twice in the opening. I am convince that trying to play perfect is a waste of time, as perfect play is far beyond human capabilities. My point is that it may very well turn out that perfect play involve moves that look illogical to our partial understanding of chess. In other words, we are far from understanding every move a tablebase can make (a tablebase makes perfect moves).

Yekatrinas

Re length of combinations I once played a very strong team on the internet in a game which lasted a year. Towards the end I did a combination which was about 15 moves deep. It was a knight sac which I prepared many moves in advance and after the knight sac it took 8 moves to show it was winning.

There were many viewers on the internet and even after I played 

50. Nxa5 hardly anyone could understand what I was doing.

So, I am sure there are now some very long combinations with the increase in strength of the players.

Taylor vs TCCMB Team  Year 2002 Internet  Challenge by Dave Taylor vs TCMMB Team

This was a forced sequence of moves or at least the team and I both thought so up to and after the knight sac.

The queen and pawn vs queen endgames you keep referring is not something that grandmasters as a group had decided these were draws. Hardly any had even seen these exact positions. 

I am really not trying to put anyone down but there is not going to be some series of magical and seemignly not logical moves which are going to force a win from the starting position.  This is just highly unlikely. It is more likely that a solar flare will destroy the earth in the next 12 hours. 

well in the candidates we didnt see so many draws