Survival in chessland [pdf]

This is beautifully written and worth downloading.

“Ben does not prefer to use the shift key, a typographic quirk I replicated faithfully here even though it burns my eyes:”

The premise is: “if you were forced to be one of the chess pieces, which piece should you choose to give you the best chance of survival?”

The king is the obvious choice, but the author assumes kings will have to be sacrificed under victory conditions or when time runs out. This is lovely:

“Many games also end in a time forfeit, which is like the king's poor diet and lifestyle choices leading to a death by natural causes.”

The author uses 500 million chess games from lichess.org to estimate each piece's survival probability, and even makes heatmaps for which squares each piece usually dies on.

For those digging for the answer, it's in figure 3 under 4.1. It differs depending on the game style (bullet, blitz, classical). There's one piece that's common to almost all categories with a 70% chance of survival.

Tom7 made a video also: https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA

If you haven’t seen them his other videos are well worth watching as well.

Just me or something isn't quite right about the numbers? Intuitively, shouldn't the survival rates of the white and black kings add up to exactly 100% in each type of game, even given the rules and interpretations that the author laid out at the beginning of the article?

Such a chess game actually plays out in the novel "Carrion Comfort" by Dan Simmons.

Fascinating stuff! Sadly Windows only, otherwise I'd be interested in seeing if the results are any different run against KingBase or another collection of mostly GM games.