You Can Win 4-Player Chess By Resigning?

1. At least in free-for-all, Chess 4 doesn't sound very entertaining.

2. By this reasoning, FIBA basketball does not play by "real rules" and thus I refuse to watch the Olympics or Eurobasket. As everyone knows, there are only 3 sets of real rules of basketball and any others are frauds: 

• The original rules with peach baskets, developed by Dr. James Naismith
• NBA rules
• NCAA rules (men's rules only, sorry, ladies)

Chess 4 is a free for all, but if someone resigns, they lose instead of win.

Yeah, like I said: not very entertaining. Depending on the scoring system, at best you are going to have endgame scenarios where it is impossible* for the trailing player to catch the leading player, but the game goes on pointlessly for many moves simply because the trailing player refuses to resign. At worst (say, if there's an asinine rule like "last man standing wins, period") you have an incredibly dull game where all four players realize that their best shot at winning is to form a Hedgehog setup and spend a hundred moves avoiding attacks, sacrifices, and even exchanges while hoping someone else does something. 

*In standard 2-player chess, the player who is "losing" always theoretically has a chance to win, as long as he has sufficient mating material. Maybe the other guy will blunder 10 times in a row and allow him to turn the tables! But 4-player games with numerical scoring systems similar to the one used here on chess.com create cases where it is numerically impossible for the trailing player to win no matter how many times the other guy blunders. If you are down by 37 points and the other guy only has a knight and three pawns left, even [taking all the other guy's remaining pieces+checkmate] will still leave you down by 11 points. It makes no sense to allow the trailing player the ability to continue the game indefinitely in cases where he cannot win.

i just lost by one point because i didnt quit.  and since when is playing safe, defensive and smart not part of chess>?

ok well, i just won twice in a row by letting my time run out lol lol. it seems cheap but its fair if everyone knows the scoring system.  theres strategy to be able to get in the position to do that, but is it not possible to have the rules where if you resign or time runs out you get 0 points?  why wouldnt that work? the game is still very very fun. im better at this than normal chess 

To my surprise I also got the claim win based victory, I was meaning to resign though. Another thing I realised that you get 5 point for simultaneous check to, two opponents. Pretty cool

These aren't the real rules of 4-way-chess or chess 4 though. Here are the real rules:

"Singles is substantially harder than team play. In this method, each player can attack any of the other three players and vice versa. Once a player is checkmated, the checkmated player can either remove their pieces from the board, or the player that checkmated can use the remaining pieces during that player's turn. Play continues until only one player remains."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-player_chess

https://media.kohlsimg.com/is/image/kohls/734346?wid=500&hei=500&op_sharpen=1

looooooooool for all your boring droning on, over and over again, about "real rules" when the board game with the so-called "real rules" is one almost nobody on earth has heard of or plays, the point stands unchallenged that Chess4, if one plays by rules like those described on the wikipedia page, is HELLA BORING as a game. If checkmate means you lose instantly, then obviously players are going to do everything possible to discourage their opponents from attacking them so the opponents instead focus on the other players first. Which creates a situation where anyone who knows what he's doing is going to just form some hyper-defensive setup like the hedgehog and wait for players who have chosen more vulnerable formations to get attacked and checkmated. Of course, if you have four players who all know this then nobody is ever going to try to attack, and the game is going to go on for hours. Congratulations - it's Monopoly without the fake money or going to jail or getting to drive a rad pewter car around the board!

LOOOL, isn't that what mostly 2-player chess is? "...and the game is going to go on for hours." with lots of draws...

Um, no. This is a laughably terrible analogy.

Yes, chess at the highest levels features long games (at standard time controls) with lots of draws. No, this is NOT boring, nor is it the result of the dynamic we are discussing where all players have huge disincentives to play for an advantage. 

In general, when Carlsen and Caruana play a match with lots of draws, it's because they are both analyzing at an extremely high level and playing very accurately: they are playing for advantage, but they also avoid unnecessary risks that will lead to the other guy gaining too much of an advantage (or getting a decisive tactical shot, of course). 

In 4-player singles with a "last man standing wins, but if you're mated, you lose" rule, the players are in what is essentially a prisoner's dilemma: there are such substantial advantages to waiting for your opponents to wipe each other out that everyone waits. The incentives are such that the only feasible strategy (aside from the "strategy" of picking three 9-year-olds who blunder all the time to be your opponents) is tipped completely toward the side of risk-aversion and not even trying for advantage. That is why it is sound for chess.com to balance the game out with a scoring system that encourages significantly more risk-taking.

""last man standing wins, but if you're mated, you lose" rule"

No such thing. No checkmate in this. The "checkmated" player still can move the king then the other player takes the king (does not have to). Then the rest of the pieces belong to the player who captured the king until "last man standing".

The rule is not just in chess 4 but since the rules in chess 4 from the 1800s.

lulzzz dude, in this one thread you've gone from "I invented four-player chess 23 years ago in high school" to "the rules date back to the 1800s" to "every time someone points out why this or that rule I insisted was definitive isn't any good, I'm just going to keep citing various other rules from a board game that nobody plays, that nobody can easily find, and that are contradicted by my own previous claims about what the rules are".

I ain't engaging with this trollish nonsense again until you post an actual image from the Chess 4 box that documents the actual rules so we can have an intelligent discussion about them.

At least I thought I invented 4-way-chess (that's what I called it). This was in the fall of 1995.

I didn't even know that it existed. The board that I made for it was the same as you see on chess 4 except that it has one less row in the front on all sides. In other words 32 less squares (each side had 1 row (8 squares) less).

 Anyone ever notice that there’s never any 4 way chess emojis

Still has draws in this game...

No, you didn't win. You lost by 5 points.

On your move 28 the score is:.

Green 12 (he is out of the game)

Red 24

Blue 32

Yellow 24

You, playing the Yellow pieces, played Qb8+, checking the Blue king. Red now gets to move before Blue. Red plays Qxa5. 

Blue is now checkmated. Before Red's move, he could have escaped to the back rank, but now he cannot - Red cut off his escape. Also, he has no available interpositions and he can't capture your checking queen. Because Blue was not checkmated before Red's move and now he is, Red gets credit for the checkmate even though he is not checking Blue's king directly - in 4-player free for all, when you play a move that results in an opponent being checkmated, that checkmate belongs to you. Red now gets 20 points for checkmate plus 5 for capturing the bishop at the same time. The score is now:

Green 12

Red 49 

Blue 32

Yellow 24

You make a meaningless move on move 29: you "capture" Blue's king. But you get zero points for this because the king is now deadwood - blue is already mated; he didn't lose by resigning or timing out. Red already got the 20 points associated with Blue's king because he was the one who actually mated Blue. That's why the king is grayed out before you take it. It is only when the king is still colored that you are able to score 20 points by capturing it.

It's now Red's turn and he clicks the Claim Win button. He is more than 20 points ahead of you, so even though this gives you 20 more points, Red still wins. The final score is:

Green 12

Red 49

Blue 32

Yellow 44

To avoid this immediate loss, you would have needed to capture at least 5 points of Red's material on move 29 so that Red would be less than 21 points ahead of you when it's his turn to move. Unfortunately for you, your only available capture was to play QxN, which only gets you 3 points, and 3 points are not enough to help you here. So ultimately your playing 28. Qb8+ was a blunder: thanks to your ill-timed check, your opponent playing Red was able to swoop in and score a checkmate that gave him the points he needed to win the game.

no, I think you should win, the game is based on points, the complexity is too much. It isn't fair if one player does lots of damage and the other player is trying not to be noticed