(And apparently it would be a more _interesting_ game without castling. At least according to the game that the AIs at Deep Mind played when they trained them on this variant on a whim. Castling was supposed to speed up development of chess, but it favours the defense a lot.
So what the game's appeal wins from castling in cutting out some busy work moves, it loses in attacking spirit.)
The non-castling variant was invented by Vladimir Kramnik[2] explored by Deep Mind not on a whim but specifically as part of Vlad's exploration of whether this chess variant would help to revitalise the game given how computer evaluation has affected theory.[3] There were also a couple of no-castling tournaments played, but like chess960[4], opinions were very much divided about whether or not it was actually any kind of improvement.
[1] Even though I pretty much always fall into stalemate traps in blitz.
[2] Former world champion and lately old guy shouting at clouds about cheating
[3] https://www.chess.com/article/view/no-castling-chess-kramnik...
The game keeps going until one side gets too tired and gives up (or makes a mistake that breaks the stalemate).
Another idea would be a "Fortnite rule": after $X turns, the outermost edge of the board kills any pieces left in it (or becomes "the storm" in Fortnite parlance); repeat every $X turns until someone's forced into checkmate because there's only a 2×2 square left and nowhere else for the kings to go except within each others' attack range.
That's what I was asking - do they get to "pass" and the other side gets to move? This is how it works in the game of go for instance. In chess that would be more or less equivalent to the non-stalemated player winning, because in many stalemate positions if you had an extra move you could checkmate.
The stalemate rule adds something that the attacking player has to keep in mind and gives the defending player something to shoot for - lots of creative and tricky play arises from this, with IM Eric Rosen being the most famous exponent[1] so much so that he now has a particular type of stalemate trap named after him.[2]
I'm not seriously entertaining your Fortnite rule. That is such a radical departure from the game of chess as not to be the same at all, so you could have that as a chess variant or whatever but it's fundamentally a different game.
[1] https://youtu.be/YB_LLivPlY8?si=dWl2bEAEeRmzhBiC
[2] Defending king in the corner with the opposing queen a knight's move away and no other legal moves for the defender. https://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-analysis/the-rosen-tra...
As said elsewhere, I would suggest removing rules against putting yourself in check.
> The stalemate rule adds something that the attacking player has to keep in mind and gives the defending player something to shoot for - lots of creative and tricky play arises from this, with IM Eric Rosen being the most famous exponent[1] so much so that he now has a particular type of stalemate trap named after him.[2]
That's why I was careful in saying that the proposed change would make the rules more elegant, less clunky. I did not say anything about this making chess a better game. Sometimes adding weird corner cases to your rules can make the game better.
Just look at all the weird rules that you can find in Skat or Doppelkopf. (Though Mü is an example of a game with much cleaner rules that captures a similar spirit.)
It's like you introduced a bug in refactoring and are insisting on the change because the code looks nicer now.
However, I don't actually think that removing check rules make chess worse. But that's subject to experiment.
See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for exactly such experiments.
If you run out of legal moves then that seems like an outright loss condition, no? My understanding of "stalemate" is when you can move but there's no way to actually force a win (e.g. kings chasing each other around the board). I ain't a chess expert, so maybe I'm using the wrong terminology.
1. The threefold repetition rule: if a board position repeats 3 times either side may claim a draw. In online chess this is automatic but in over the board chess people may not always realise the position has repeated especially if there is a gap between repetitions.
2. The 50 move rule: if 50 moves pass without a pawn moving or a capture being made then it is a draw.
3. Insufficient material: if neither side has sufficient material to checkmate then it is a draw. In some rule systems [1] it has to be sufficient material to force checkmate in some it's just sufficient material to mate[2] (ie the defending side can blunder into it). So if there are no pawns and both sides just have a lone king, or it is king and knight vs king or king and bishop vs king then it's always a draw. In USCF and chess.com king and 2 knights is a draw in FIDE tournaments or on lichess it's not. King and 2 bishops on up is not a draw because you can force checkmate.
4. Draw by agreement: the two sides can agree a draw. In some tournament situations this is only allowed after a certain move but there are ways the players can deliberately go into some sort of situation which is a known theoretical draw and just repeat 3 times by tacit agreement. Including amusingly/notoriously (depending on your pov) the Carlsen/Nakamura "double bongcloud" game [3]
[1] US Chess federation and chess.com in particular
[2] FIDE and I think lichess
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/mar/18/bongcloud-meme...
But they also have weird rules that both (A) forbid putting your king in check, and (B) hand you a draw when you are out of legal moves.
A simpler version of chess would actually play until the king is captured, and allow people to move into check.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf reports on some experiments with variants like this.
Another interesting thing to try out is to allow players to capture their own pieces. Or to abolish castling.
If the only two pieces left are kings, that is a stalemate. It is not even a legal move for two kings to come within one square of each other.
I was not talking about the rule that handles games that do not progress. (Though I would perhaps replace that rule with one that just forbids repeating board states, but that was besides the point here.)
So to make chess more elegant in how the rules are formulated (but probably not a better game, mind you), I would suggest removing all special rules around check and checkmate. Just replace it with the rule that you lose when your king gets captured (and obviously, keep Zugzwang).
Sorry, I was not clear that I also wanted to remove special handling of check and checkmate.
(Btw, this feels very similar to the rules against self-sacrifice in Go.)
Stalemate mostly just makes the game more interesting when otherwise the position would be completely uninteresting.
If stalemate is a win, almost any king and pawn vs king position is a win, which means almost every rook or bishop ending up a pawn is a win, which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game. Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it.
Which in turn makes only the most boring openings viable.
Now every game is boring.
Also, in tournament play, finishing your game early just means you have to wait longer until the next round, even in a round robin event. Because chess tournaments pretty much never start a round until the previous round is completely over. Not since adjournments stopped being a thing.
> Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it.
Chess is a zero sum game. Taking the right risk can also increase your chances of winning (instead of just stalemating).
(I mention the zero sum game, because eg real life war is not a zero sum game. So it's perfectly possible for certain actions, like starting to shoot medics, to be bad for both parties. But in chess, what's bad for one party is automatically good for the other.)
> [..] which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game.
You know that the other guy gets to have a vote on this, too?
You can also have a look at the Eastern chess variations (Shogi etc) that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141452 mentions that don't have check rules, and see whether for them every game is boring?
Btw, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for an investigation of the impact of no-check-rules on western chess. It doesn't make everything boring.
> Stalemate=win chess has little effect on the opening and middlegame play, mostly affecting the evaluation of certain endgames. As such, it does not increase decisiveness of the game by much, as it seems to almost always be possible to defend without relying on stalemate as a drawing resource. Therefore, this chess variant is not likely to be useful for sidestepping known theory or for making the game substantially more decisive at the high level. The overall effect of the change seems to be minor.
This does not seem to support your suggestion that eliminating check rules and ending the game with the capture of the king, would make all games boring.
(However, they had really good computers play, who do not get stressed out, albeit they do make worse moves on shorter time controls.)
There is a Chess game that does this. It's Chinese Chess (which is just as old as Western Chess, and has the same origin in India). In Chinese Chess, the objective is to capture (or as the Chinese say, "eat") the king. There is no prohibition against putting your King in check. It works just fine, unless the only pieces left are Kings. The main problem is players doing checks forever or chasing pieces around forever: the rule is that if you do that you lose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi
Now stalemate by repeated back-and-forth is a different matter. I would favor some variant of Go's Ko rule, which is that you may not make a move if the result would be a board that looked exactly the same as it had in the past.
Btw, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for an investigation.
> Now stalemate by repeated back-and-forth is a different matter. I would favor some variant of Go's Ko rule, which is that you may not make a move if the result would be a board that looked exactly the same as it had in the past.
I would favour that rule as well, but keep in mind that even in Go that is a very modern formulation / variation of this rule. Past formulations were about as clunky as chess's stalemate rules, and even left some situation (that were extremely rare in practice) without a satisfactory resolution.
Btw, in Go the 'board' isn't the only state the game has: you also count prisoners. After a complicated ko exchange, the board might look the same, but the prisoner count has gone up for both players. I assume the rules probably only care about the difference in prisoner counts (and board state) to determine whether a state has been repeated; not the absolute prisoner count.
Then that side loses. If they can't move, it's because any move would put them in check and therefore captured next turn. If they're in that position, they've obviously lost.
Passing makes no sense since it contradicts the rule that says chess players must always make a move during their turns. There is no contradiction with stalemates: since they must make a move and any move puts the king in check, it is hopeless and they lose.
> Neither seems at all satisfactory.
Can't be worse than drawing a game because the clearly beaten opponent can't legally move into a check.
This is an actual strategy. Refuse to resign and try to get the opponent to blunder his pieces into a stalemate in the end game thereby drawing the game. It's asinine but sometimes it actually works, especially at my noobish level.