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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, when I was talking about the stalemate rule, I meant the rule that declares that the game is a draw, if the only move you can make is putting yourself into check.

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.)

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> Sorry, when I was talking about the stalemate rule, I meant the rule that declares that the game is a draw, if the only move you can make is putting yourself into check.

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.

Thanks for bringing up the Chinese chess example!

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.

I don't know about Japanese rules, which are borderline insane. I use the only rational ones: Chinese rules! As far as I know, in Chinese rules, Ko only considers the board configuration.

Well, I have the same reaction (though a bit muted) the Western Chess's refusal to capture the king.

This would make the game less elegant, in my view. There are too many endgames that are just trivially winning if you make stalemate a win for the stalemating player.

Stalemate mostly just makes the game more interesting when otherwise the position would be completely uninteresting.

That would just result in earlier resignations so that both players could get back to a more interesting game.

No, you're fundamentally changing the game, not when people resign.

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.

When people complain about chess being uninteresting, they usually complain about too many draws. Adding more opportunities to turn draws into wins/losses might seem like a good 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.

Addendum from the linked paper:

> 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.

Personally I find it very entertaining when a player pulls a rabbit out of their hat by turning an obviously worse position into a stalemate by some crazy trick. I think it adds some skill expression to an otherwise boring end game, and gives the losing player something to fight for at the end. Admittedly this is more interesting in a format that results in a time crunch at the end.

According to the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf) removing the special handling of stalemates did not really change the draw ratio much. So the weaker party can still gun for the draw in most situations.

(However, they had really good computers play, who do not get stressed out, albeit they do make worse moves on shorter time controls.)

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