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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

I don’t personally think reducing draws would improve the game at all

This is primarily for computer chess, where the draw rate is even higher than in super-GM level chess. It's an alternative to having engines play from a preset position where one side starts with a significant advantage, which is what usually happens in computer chess tournaments. It's essentially the subset of Chess960 positions that don't need modifications to the castling rule, and thus should work on all engines without requiring any changes to the code.

It's not quite a subset of Chess960 positions, because Chess324 allows different piece layouts between white and black and Chess960 does not.

Edit: A comment further down points out that only 18 of the 324 positions are symmetrical, so the vast majority of Chess324 positions could not happen in 960.

An alternative is just to stop bending over backwards solely for the sake of supporting castling, which is an inelegant hack in the first place.

Isn't the argument something about how grandmasters are incentivized to play it safe to a draw much of the time, which results in less interesting games?

That is the argument that people make, yes, but if you watch top level chess you’d see that’s absolutely not the case. In the current age of computer prep a lot of games involve extremely sharp lines where one side will make some kind of positional or material sacrifice quite early to secure an imbalanced position based on computer preparation and then the whole game revolves around whether or not they can convert the subsequent advantage in initiative. Removing draws from the game would mean there is absolutely no incentive to ever sacrifice material, making adventurous attacking play a strictly losing strategy at the highest level, to the obvious detriment of the game in general.

Secondly, at other levels one of the most important things is always whether a player can show enough sustained technique to convert some advantage and there’s always a chance for the person who is behind to swindle some draw if the guy who’s ahead can’t do this. This sort of a change would make that conversion technique somewhat irrelevant. The person ahead could just turtle up and guarantee themselves a win.

I know for a lot of people having draws in a game is very unsatisfying to some spectators[1], but the existence of draws in a game changes the strategy a lot meaning a player who is ahead has to press their advantage in order to secure the win and not allow a late heroic rearguard defence to secure a draw. That is (in my view) generally good for the game.

[1] I am a big fan of cricket and this is a common criticism of the game from folks who don’t like it.

I don't think this variant is for playing, but for practicing tactical games against a computer.

Certainly not if it is done by randomly giving one player a substantial advantage.

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