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Effect of Stalemate=Win rule

Posted By: Nack Ballard
Date: Sunday, 9 December 2018, at 3:46 a.m.

In Response To: Effect of Stalemate=Win rule (Timothy Chow)

I don't think that this analysis makes any sense because if the stalemate rule (or as I prefer to express it, the checkmate rule) were changed, then we can't assume that Carlsen and Caruana would have played as they actually did. In any top-level game, players have a huge store of "known drawn positions" in their minds, and they will steer their play accordingly, sometimes as early as the opening phase of the game. If you make a large change to that database of known drawn positions then their steering will be affected.

I agree that the players would play differently. That might lead to more draws or fewer draws than my retro-analysis suggests. But I had to illustrate the issue from some starting point.

You seem to be assuming that with fewer known drawn positions available, players will try harder to play for one of them. It may be that one or both tries harder to avoid them. Maybe one of each or neither. If players just aim to play strong moves for advantage (which I believe is in essence what they try to do most of the time), the player that plays better will find himself drifting into the (larger) win window more often, and I believe that is true for human vs human, engine vs engine, or human vs engine.

The set of drawn positions will indeed be noticeably reduced. But chess will still be fundamentally a drawn game, and you'll still need a large advantage to win a game, which will happen at about the same rate as currently.

We seem to agree that the set of drawn positions will be noticeably reduced, but we arrive at a different conclusion. To my mind, it logically follows there will be fewer draws.

This case is relatively extreme, but... suppose the rules of Go or basketball or football were such that if a player/team ended up ahead by fewer than 30 points the game is drawn, and spectators started complaining that almost all the games between pros are draws -- Go/basketball/football is just a fundamentally drawn game. Then the rules are changed simply such that a draw is only within a 5-point window (the actual window is 0 points). Would there still be the same percentage of draws?

Nack

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