Modernizing the Game of Chess

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quadibloc
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Joined: Tue Jan 25, 2022 10:51 pm

Modernizing the Game of Chess

Post by quadibloc » Wed Jan 26, 2022 8:14 pm

I can't disagree that Chess seems to be in need of some kind of change.
On my own personal web site, I have expressed some thoughts about the issue.
The recurring concerns about chess seem to me to fall into three main ones:
For competing at the highest levels in Chess - or even to avoid being crushed when one first visits a chess club - it seems necessary to memorize a very large amount of opening theory.
Chess games these days seem to end in draws a lot of the time.
Also, the play of a chess game is usually defensive and positional; gone are the dashing Queen sacrifices of the Romantic era except on rare occasions, so it's less exciting as a spectator sport.
Several effective ways have been proposed for dealing with the first issue; variants such as Fischer Random Chess on the one hand, or such as Pocket Knight Chess, Seierawan/Sharper Chess, Musketeer Chess, and Camaratta Chess all would deal with it effectively.
Many players, though, are happy with the game of Chess the way it is, as far as playing it goes. The fact that a fixed board layout leads to a mass of opening theory means that this mass can continue to grow, so it is possible to keep learning new things about Chess, which is part of the game's attraction.
I've been looking at addressing the second issue, which seems harder to solve.
One simple scheme that has been proposed is to score draws as 1/3 - 1/3, so as to penalize them.
I think there is a problem here, because it forces the players to balance two contradictory goals - making the best score against their opponent, and avoiding draws. But even if it works perfectly, it is only applicable to tournaments; it would have no effect on a match between two players, and since the World Championship chess match gets the most attention from the general public, if the goal is to make Chess more attractive as a spectator sport, we have to do something that has an impact there.
An idea I had come up with might, in one form, work like this:
As it is at present, checkmate splits the points 1-0 or 0-1, depending on whether White or Black wins, and a draw is 1/2 - 1/2.
Stalemate, I propose, instead of being a draw, should be a 3/5 - 2/5 split of the point. This way, while it puts something on the board, it is worth only 1/5 as much as checkmate, so the part of endgame theory that is about not blundering a checkmate into a stalemate would remain intact.
But this would just be a necessary ancilliary change to the change that would really reduce the frequency of draws.
I propose that perpetual check - one player can give check indefinitely, regardless of what the other player does, one special case of repetition of moves - also be a partial win, but only a tiebreaker point. And, furthermore, if Black inflicts perpetual check, it should be a primary tiebreaker point, but if White (with the first move advantage) does so, it should be a secondary tiebreaker point.
This means that the primary tiebreaker points are compared first before the secondary ones are even considered.
I was inspired to think in this direction by the story of how the game of Go overcame its problem with draws through the adoption of komidashi; unfortunately, Chess isn't scored by points, so the fix can't be quite as simple.
As for the third issue, I have to admit that I'm stumped. One has to expect players to play rationally in order to win, and so one can't blame Steinitz for revealing the truth about how to play Chess in the most effective manner. One could make sacrifices more powerful by making captures compulsory, as in Checkers; but that makes it harder to calculate variations, so that another problem would be worsened, by making Chess relatively harder for people but easier for computers.
In addition to Go, I thought of checkers - the 8 by 8 English game of draughts had encountered the embarassment of a championship match where most of the games were identical move for move - the Wyllie-Martins match in 1863. Checkers players loved their game enough to put up with the two-move restriction, and then the three-move restrictiion, in order to save it, having the first two or three moves of the game picked at random. At least that will not be necessary for Chess. (And 10 by 10 International checkers does not seem to have needed to resort to such expedients either.)

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