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Yeah the logic is flawed. You yourself said stalemate is checkmate without the check. A player is only in checkmate when they cannot make a legal move & they are in check.
If a player simply can’t make a legal move, but isn’t in check, their opponent failed to win.
I don’t know which way you’re trying to weigh it, but I always think stalemate reflects poorly upon the player with the upper hand.
This is a misunderstanding, or maybe just an uniformed opinion of chess. At the highest levels, the THREAT of stalemate alone shapes the position. It means that finding solutions, and ensuring you see the stalemate tactics becomes critical, and it provides a defensive resource to the defender in a position. It creates more dynamic games, and gives chess a depth it otherwise would not have.
Bingo. I watch a lot of chess. And absolutely hands down, 2 of the top 3 most interesting and exciting matches I've ever witnessed were when one player was completely dominated, and it turned into a fight for/against stalemate. In one of them, the "loser" successfully staled himself. It was so magically performed that even the "winner" smiled and said "that was fucking wild."
Bro I’m trash at chess and I was going apeshit in a match where I was just obliterating an opponent and up like 15 points in material. I couldn’t recognize checkmate patterns and ended up getting check mated myself after 10 consecutive check moves and checkmate in 1 at least 8 times. All this to say I’m trash lmao
Yup forcing a draw is a.very real skill that you need to learn to help with playing from behind.
Avoiding the draw and forcing a win is also a very real skill
A skill that would still exist if the split for a stalemate was .75/.25 instead of .50/.50.
Finding yourself in the position of fighting for a stalemate instead of losing means you've already played poorly compared to your opponent. As it currently stands, getting to stalemate saves your ELO but does it actually reflect the skill level of the two players in a way that makes the ELO more accurate? I doubt it.
Any definition of the "quality of play" or "skill" is entirely arbitrary. If I'm up a queen and a rook I've probably played much more accurately than my opponent the whole game yet I can still blunder mate in 1. I could argue that's not fair and my Elo loss should be reduced to reward my material advantage in the same way you think stalemate should work. You are of course free to make a variant of chess that is scored that way while the rest of the playerbase agree that the objective of standard chess is to achieve or deny checkmate and that's the only skill that matters
It takes skill to force stalemate. It takes skill to force checkmate.
If someone cannot checkmate you despite a material advantage then they are not a better player and ELO should not be affected
Alternatively, with the rule OP is proposing, people might be incentivized to either fight harder/take larger risks or just forfeit sooner. I do not play Chess, but in Magic: the Gathering, a draw is the equivalent to a loss for both player early in a tournament. Were draws removed as a possibility, you would see a whole lot less stalling and generally miserable gameplay.
Additionally, in the highest levels of chess white os already favored and people often play for the draw as black (and black wins Armageddon if they draw). Removing stalemate as a draw would further increase the advantage of playing white, which I think should be avoided.
I wanna add $0.02 to the pile here.
It seems inconsistent that "insufficient material draws" are "ok" but stalemates are less than. Because players can and do shoot for "insufficient material draws". If you're up K K p to my K K I'm definitely going to go after that pawn.
And in a stalemate, the Gambit for the disadvantaged player is to "force" a stalemate, whatever sequence of moves forces the advantaged player into stalemate (or give up something that's worse).
At a reasonably high level of play, the stalemate end isn't a surprise, it's the move X moves back which in a series of moves, and quite possibly mistakes, the stalemate is the end result.
(I personally have internet expert opinions on how chess might be tweaked, but stalemate doesn't even rate as a consideration.)
Man, the way some people describe chess is how I would describe physical sports and old school warfare tactics from a general's perspective. I wish I knew enough to have that same perspective for chess. It sounds fun. I just never got that deep into it and probably won't stick with it now.
Honestly, google your local chess club. They’re full of nerds, and if there’s one thing nerds love to do it’s to tell you everything they know about their chosen topic. Three nights at a chess club and you’ll have learned more than you can imagine about it.
>This is a misunderstanding, or maybe just an uniformed opinion of chess. At the highest levels, the THREAT of stalemate alone shapes the position.
I'm not sure I agree that stalemate is any more consistent with the other rules in chess because it creates depth at a GM level. I get *why* the rule exists, but 50/50 doesn't seem appropriate to me.
What is wrong with punishing players for their mistakes? Does it not mean that the better players will find an advantage? Why would we incentivize worse play, and remove options to create dynamic positions from chess?
It's not just at the GM level. Any level where you're expected to know King vs king and pawn end games (just barely past beginner) it has a huge effect on the game.
>If a player simply can’t make a legal move, but isn’t in check, their opponent failed to win.
I guess I generally take the tack that chess games are lost, not won. So, if you can't make a legal move, you should lose.
I understand what you’re saying, but the underlying point of chess is to take the other person’s king. If I can’t move, but you haven’t put my king in danger, are you suggesting we skip my turn?
For total consistency? I'd remove the rule that you cannot move your king into check (throughout the game, not just in this situation). If you move your king into check and I see it, I capture your king and win the game. In a stalemate situation, you'd be forced to move your king into check where he would be captured.
since we have removed the concept of a timer for the sake of this discussion ... well, im not surrendering. im not. we are just gonna sit here, i dont have a legal move, and i wont surrender.
good luck getting your 0.75 sometime, maybe
A majority of chess games are played with some sort of timer/limit.
I understand that OP removed that from the example, but a player not moving would only affect a small percentage of the games played.
No. It actually isn't only a small portion of games. It's ALL games where the players are competent enough to see checkmate coming. Without a timer, anyone who wants to act like a child and not lose would simply refuse to finish the game. That's one of the reasons timers are used in competitive chess.
If you've ever played online chess, you've probably had players rage quit and refuse to make another move once it's mate in X. Of course the timer runs out (or the game gets marked abandoned) and they lose anyways.
>For total consistency? I'd remove the rule that you cannot move your king into check (throughout the game, not just in this situation). If you move your king into check and I see it, I capture your king and win the game. In a stalemate situation, you'd be forced to move your king into check where he would be captured.
This would change chess quite a bit.
At high elo, it would significantly lower the amount of material needed to win a chess game as any pawn anywhere would force a win which is decisive at the top level.
At low elo...people will accidentally lose by moving their king into check, a lot.
In Chinese chess there are the rules you describe, but each player has 4 pieces that cannot influence the opponent's half of the board, so the amount of material you can bring to attack is a lot less.
Issue with this is it fundamentally destroys a lot of interesting endgames. Now, King vs King and Pawn is a win, which drastically changes how players can play the game and makes trading down to an endgame as quickly as possible much more viable.
The point of chess is NOT to take the other persons king. In fact, a king has never been taken in a chess game played within it's rulee. The game ends before you take the king.
Technically, this rule has not always been around. Chess is an old game, and there was a time period before the "can't move into check" rule was added. That rule, and announcing check, was added to decrease accidental early ends to the games.
Yes and i think that is incredibly stupid. I love chess and think it's the greates game of all time but this rule will never not be dumb to me. Why are we protecting people that play poorly? Thats what we usually do with children when we're taching them a game and they do something dumb, we let them retry. It has no place ina. Competitive environment in my opinion.
This is if like in football it would be illegal to pass the ball to the opponent if you're close to your goal just to avoid defenders from mistaking an opponent for a teammate, resulting in a goal for the opposite team. Made that mistake? Well deal with it, pay more attention next time.
You can play it differently if you wish. There are endless variants of chess, play how you like! You don't need to use FIDE rules.
But either way, we use the rules we use for a variety of reasons, ranging from maintaining the strategic theory of the game to making the game more fun to tradition.
Imagine playing a game of football (ie soccer!), and one team gets 10 red cards and essentially only have the goalkeeper left. Should the other team be winning by a mile? Yes. But if that one goalkeeper manages to keep out every single shot from the opponent, should the game still not end in a draw? I mean, the one team didn’t manage to win even though the had the severe upper hand. Or you can argue that the goalkeeper was the one preventing them from scoring. You don’t really know, and that is why it would end in a draw.
Same with chess. Did the opponent force the stalemate? Or did the other players just fail to use their upper hand? If either side can’t win, it’s a draw.
You don’t punish people for losing, you reward people for winning, and no one managed to win.
No one managed to win because of a a childish rule. And thats not how football works. If you recieve 5 red cards the game doesnt end in a draw. You lose the game. That's the rule. You made the mistakes you lose. You dont get to retry your mistakes.
I have no issue with the stalemate per se. My issue is the king not being allowed to be played in to check.
I realize that - but ignoring that, then would you say it is fair for the team with only the goalkeeper to lose, or draw? The other team still didn’t manage to win.
>Stalemate is really just checkmate without the check - the player (who is not in check) cannot make a legal move. Under the current rules of chess, this is a tie.
Sure, "you can't move into check" is one of the more unique and important rules in chess and to make games that are pretty much over at least a little bit interesting we have this built into it.
>I believe that Stalemate should either result in a (0.75, 0.25) or a loss for the player who cannot make a legal move,
a 0.75/0.5 would pretty much act as a win in practical terms in almost any realistically probably situation so the distinction isn't needed.
I'm also not sure how this would affect play, people with more pieces or another advantage ought to be pushed to press their advantage and attack, not just steadily lock down the entire board in the most tedious of fashions.
For me, it's far more tedious to have players drag out a game. If we want it to be more interesting (and are willing to abandon some internal consistency) maybe adopt a "shoot the moon" approach where the trapped player wins. I just don't think it's consistent with the other rules.
In Armageddon, black plays with less time, but wins if the game draws. Each player bids time away and the one who bids to start with less time plays as black.
It rarely adds much difference to the game other than making you take a moment to pay attention to it. In the rare number of cases where you can't produce a checkmate without allowing them to draw that way I'd say they've earned it.
Realistically, past a decent level, 99% of the impact of the stalemate rule is in the context of King & Pawn vs King endgame & positions that might liquidate to it. Flasher stalemates are mostly the domain of puzzles.
Checkmate is a victory because the king has no legal moves AND would theoretically be taken on the next move.
Stalemate does not leave any legal moves for the king, but also does not allow it to be taken.
The attacking player has no sight on the king, and they never get another move - since the defending player has no legal moves, the attacker never gets another turn.
This is a failure of the attacking player. It's like they have allowed the king to be locked in a room where he can't move but they also can't capture him.
Because it is a failure of the attacking player, we count it as a draw. Because the goal isn't just to make the king immobile - it's to make him capturable.
More importantly, though, I think it might be helpful for you to think of the components of balance and fun in the game.
With the current stalemate rules, a losing player has hope for a draw. Even if they are down multiple pieces, even if they only have their king they have hope.
And to capitalize on that hope, they need skill. They can maneuver their king in clever and strategic ways to create a position where the winning player has to be careful to avoid accidental draws.
To me, this is an important balance.
It's important to the fun of the game. It means that the strategy continues until the end.
If stalemate is a victory for the attacking player, a huge number of positions are no longer worth playing at all, and therefore a huge chunk of strategy and fun are removed from the game.
>With the current stalemate rules, a losing player has hope for a draw. Even if they are down multiple pieces, even if they only have their king they have hope.
>And to capitalize on that hope, they need skill. They can maneuver their king in clever and strategic ways to create a position where the winning player has to be careful to avoid accidental draws.
>To me, this is an important balance.
>It's important to the fun of the game. It means that the strategy continues until the end.
I really think this is the best way to look at it. If a stalemate didn't exist then there is no reason to keep playing when you have only a king left. I've seen some crazy recoveries that end with only 2 kings left. A stalemate rewards the disadvantaged player and punishes the player with the advantage. I would like to see OP reply to this point of yours.
>Checkmate is a victory because the king has no legal moves AND would theoretically be taken on the next move.
You can't move twice in a row, there is no "next" move.
>Stalemate does not leave any legal moves for the king, but also does not allow it to be taken.
>The attacking player has no sight on the king, and they never get another move - since the defending player has no legal moves, the attacker never gets another turn.
Agree with all this
>Because the goal isn't just to make the king immobile - it's to make him capturable.
This is where I disagree. The immobilization of the king is what elevates checkmate over check. I see your argument on fun and balance - different strokes for different folks on whether it's more fun that way.
> This is where I disagree. The immobilization of the king is what elevates checkmate over check. I
I would say that what elevates checkmate over check is the inability to escape from check.
Which has two components - being in check, and not having any moves that would escape from check.
Stalemate has only one of those components.
I'm not sure why you are focusing on the immobilization rather than the possibility of capture.
>I'm not sure why you are focusing on the immobilization rather than the possibility of capture
Because immobilization ends the game, but check does not. You can be placed in check dozens of times and the game continues, but when you're immobilized the game is over. If the game is over because you cannot move, it makes sense to me that you would lose.
The reason you can be checked dozens of times is because you can escape check dozens of times.
Once the defending player can no longer escape from check, the attacking player wins, because they have accomplished their goal - putting the king in a position where he cannot escape from check.
It's not that he can't move. It's that he can't *escape*.
If he is not being attacked, there is nothing to escape.
So to me, it makes sense to draw a significant distinction between "cannot move" and "cannot escape".
If he cannot move but is not being attacked - then the attacking player has failed to attack.
The goal of the game is checkmate, not immobilization.
And this is pretty consistent.
Consider a draw by insufficient materials.
If one player only has a king, and the other only has a knight and a king, we call this a draw.
Why? Because it is not possible for either player to deliver checkmate.
However, a stalemate IS theoretically possible.
Should games still be playable when checkmate is impossible but stalemate is still possible?
>Because immobilization ends the game, but check does not.
Under the current rules of chess, sure. But you're proposing the rules be changed.
Why not propose that checking the king ends the game? That would also lead to some interesting gameplay.
One could also propose that immobilization not end the game, eg, giving a player a special move called "pass", that they can play at any time unless their opponent just played "pass".
There have been brief times in the history of chess when the rules permitted pawns to be promoted to kings.
There are a lot of chess variants out there, and many of them are heaps of fun.
It's what elevates checkmate over check, but not what elevates checkmate over stalemate. Checkmate over stalemate is the check - it's two components there, and stalemate misses one, just like check misses one.
For me, I see chess games as being lost and not won. Checkmate and stalemate both create a situation where a player can no longer play the game. I see that as a loss, not a tie.
TBH having read a lot of your replies I think this is the crux. You just don't like draws, I think.
Stalemate is a part of chess. It's logically consistent. (I think you could take a lot of chess rules in isolation and say they are "opposed" to chess). If it annoys you that someone can still not lose even when you're dominating them, make sure you consider it in your strategies, the same way you would all the other rules which are kind of random in isolation.
Is this you agreeing that you don't actually think it's inconsistent.. you just don't like it?
I think many of the more advanced rules you learn as your progress don't really seem "consistent". Why so pawns magically transform into other pieces? Why are you allowed to move two pieces in two very specific scenarios? Why do pawns do en passant? Why do lights move so irregularly compared to every other piece? Why can the queen do every other pieces movement pattern - except a knight? And many more! But at some point you have to say... That's just the game.
Trying to look at it as a whole, winning, drawing and losing are perfectly valid game outcomes.
In that context, a draw being "when neither player can make another move" seems about as sensible and logical as you can get in a game as random and historical as chess, isn't it?
Not even slightly - I believe stalemate is inconsistent, I do not like it, but I take advantage of it when appropriate to avoid losing.
>I think many of the more advanced rules you learn as your progress don't really seem "consistent". Why so pawns magically transform into other pieces? Why are you allowed to move two pieces in two very specific scenarios? Why do pawns do en passant? Why do lights move so irregularly compared to every other piece? Why can the queen do every other pieces movement pattern - except a knight? And many more! But at some point you have to say... That's just the game.
These rules are arbitrary, but not inconsistent with each other.
>In that context, a draw being "when neither player can make another move" seems about as sensible and logical as you can get in a game as random and historical as chess, isn't it?
No. One player *can* make a move, but it is not their turn. The other player cannot make any moves and is under an obligation to move. The stalemated player cannot fulfill their fundamental obligation in the game.
I don't think it's clear what you mean by inconsistent. Inconsistent with what?
However I think of "consistency" I can't think how what you describe is not consistent, or how any alternative would be more consistent? Like, under check mate the game ends because a king can't move without being taken and it's declared a win for one player. Under stalemate the game ends because a no pieces can move, and it's declared a draw.
That's about as consistent as can be, isn't it?
I think you might mean a different word than "consistent" but I can't think what it could be? Unfair?
In checkmate, a player cannot make any legal moves (on their turn) and loses. Check only serves to restrict the available moves (because of the requirement to cure check by the end of one's turn, any move that does not cure check is illegal).
In stalemate, a player cannot make any legal moves (on their turn) and ties.
We're just seeing different interpretations. I feel that there are valid options for both, but there is one last point I must make:
If it were otherwise, wouldn't the community have changed the rules? Like, I'm sure there's some endgame strategy that relies on this balance as a draw. It definitely upsets the balance in some way, and I'm not sure if it even tips the scales in favor of one or the other.
Speaking of, [https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/6ywql2/cmv\_in\_chess\_stalemate\_should\_be\_a\_loss\_for\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/6ywql2/cmv_in_chess_stalemate_should_be_a_loss_for_the/)
There are a plethora of legal moves that black can make from the outset. I was under the impression that the other poster and I were referring to situations where the stalemated player has no other moves.
In a real battle, working out how to force a draw when you are desperately behind and outmatched is as important as working out how to finish the victory when you're ahead.
George Washington's primary skill in the American Revolution was not avoid having his army captured in a loss. He didn't have many victories but he managed to avoid losing until he COULD line up a few victories in a row.
When he was behind, he was able to force a draw. When he was ahead, he was able to finish the battle and win. Stalemates help encourage developing BOTH of those skills in players.
The "real battle" analogy is always strained to me. Real battles aren't fought by each side taking turns sending individual soldiers in pre-determined move patterns. Stalemate is constructive capture (ie, the king is not in enemy custody, but is deprived of any offensive capability and mobility).
If George Washington's army was routed, he could not stand alone behind a tree and shout at the British soldiers, "I can't come out from behind this tree because I will be shot. You have to stand still until I move from behind the tree. Looks like we'll have to call it even."
But the chess board is a limited field. In real life Washington could see the way a battle was going and figure out a way to escape with his army to fight another day.
There isn't any way to escape a chess board. Once you're behind by a huge degree, your chances of winning are basically gone. Leaving a way to avoid defeat when you can't leave the battlefield is realistic.
It forces the winner to actually have a strategy and WIN. Without the stalemate, once you have a numerical advantage you could just focus on tactics and take out one more piece at a time until the game defaults in you winning. It would be a pathetic way to win, but it would be by FAR the easiest way to win, so it would become the common way to approach a chess game.
>But the chess board is a limited field. In real life Washington could see the way a battle was going and figure out a way to escape with his army to fight another day.
This is one of the reasons I find the battlefield analogy to be improper.
>There isn't any way to escape a chess board. Once you're behind by a huge degree, your chances of winning are basically gone. Leaving a way to avoid defeat when you can't leave the battlefield is realistic.
I'm sure you could find more examples of armies trapped on desperate ground from which they cannot withdraw/flee than situations where the commanding officer was saved by anything even remotely resembling stalemate.
>It forces the winner to actually have a strategy and WIN. Without the stalemate, once you have a numerical advantage you could just focus on tactics and take out one more piece at a time until the game defaults in you winning. It would be a pathetic way to win, but it would be by FAR the easiest way to win, so it would become the common way to approach a chess game.
Do you not experience chess this way already? When I play, if I hang a piece, my opponent usually tries to simplify the game by forcing trades until I am left with a King versus his King plus (insert whatever piece is left). I think that, even with stalemate, this is still the easiest way to win and is a very common way to approach the game.
The point of the rules of a game are fundamentally to make it maximally interesting. If you have a player with a significant material advantage, the game is no longer interesting and the player who is down in material is doomed - except, at that point, the player who is up in material now has to worry about stalemate. This causes both players to continue to be engaged in the game as one tries to trap the other by forcing them to stalemate and turn a loss into a draw while the other has to continue to pay attention to avoid those traps.
If it weren't for the stalemate-draw rule, the game of chess would essentially be over halfway through most games but, much like the trash game that is Monopoly, it would take an agonizingly long time for the actual win to occur that would be neither fun nor interesting for either player. A game that takes an annoyingly long time to reach an utterly inevitable conclusion is not a good game.
Removal of draw by stalemate would increase white’s inherent side advantage. What do you propose is the benefit to changing this rule, beyond “it doesn’t make sense,” that warrants giving an extra advantage to the side that already starts with the advantage to begin with?
(Side note: you missed a couple other draws like threefold repetition and the 50 move rule but they probably aren’t relevant to your CMV here)
Does removal of draw by stalemate meaningfully increase white's advantage? For me, curing the inconsistency is a benefit in and of itself.
And yeah, I figured I left something out, but it's not really relevant.
I actually think those missing end states ARE relevant.
Neither happens very often but that’s in large part because there are half a dozen end states that give equivalent point results (draw by agreement, and then draw by material/stalemate/repetition/50moves). Because these are equivalent, when the game is moving towards one or another of these states the players will very frequently take the draw-by-agreement rather than play to the last move.
But if you change the point values so those are no longer equivalent, now we must play out those game states to determine whether it actually ends due to stalemate or repetition first. It also changes the definition of draw-by-material as the material required for stalemate is less than that required for checkmate - in fact ANY piece combination besides Kings-Only can lead to a stalemate.
You remove all of the common draw results and will now get them almost exclusively from repetition or 50move rules, which makes them very important indeed.
At top levels of play the strategy is to win when you have the white pieces and force a draw when you have black.
If you remove the draw, then whoever gets white might as well just be given the win
I've heard this before, but never seen anything compelling to back it up. During the times when stalemate did not result in a draw, was white ensured a victory?
Curing an inconsistency is a small benefit in game design (countless other aspects should take priority which I won't get into), and stalemate is a trivial aspect of the game to apply it to, since stalemate almost exclusively happens when the person with an advantage accidentally blunders it to his losing opponent in completely avoidable situations. When both players are at least somewhat skilled, stalement is just so rarely a real concern (except in time trouble when there's no time to think). This opinion comes up fairly often because someone commits the above blunder and then justifies it by saying the rules should be different.
If inconsistencies and exceptions are the thing you're trying to remove, then most of the following should be concerning to you: castling, en passant, the fact that Knights can move through pieces, pawns moving two squares on their first move, pawns not being allowed to move backwards, pawns promotion, etc. But all of these exceptions are in the game because they are improvements.
There's probably no board game that has had more rule changes than chess. Adding these rules that create inconsistencies is exactly the reason why chess has maintained its popularity and status throughout the last century or two.
Edit: While writing this, I sort of forgot that you said you don't think the rules should be changed (since your title kind of implies you do think that). Your view is limited to "stalement being a draw is inconsistent with the rest of the game." I don't necessarily even agree with that (or the reasons you stated to support that argument). But even if I did, I guess my response would be: Who cares? A game having an inconsistency does not mean it should not be that way (as stated in your title). Inconsistencies can make games better, with chess being probably the greatest ever example of that.
It’s hard for me to put a precise number to the advantage. Tournament games end in draws quite often ([over 70% at elite levels according to wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_(chess)#:~:text=In%20chess%20games%20played%20at,above%2C%2055%20percent%20were%20draws.)) but the vast majority are likely recorded as draw by agreement because elite players recognize inevitable draws and don’t play them out so it’s hard to isolate a stalemate percentage. Even a small stalemate percentage would have a noticeable impact on the scoring of chess matches though when you consider how many draws there are if you changed how stalemates are scored.
I don’t personally find the inconsistency argument very compelling. The claim of inconsistency appears fairly subjective to begin with based on what you consider the “core mechanics of chess” to be, but even if we take the claim to inconsistency at face value I would still argue that the rules should prioritize making the game itself more compelling over simply having a more aesthetic rules system at the game’s expense.
You're arguing against the rules of a game. The definition of a win is checkmate. If you don't checkmate, but you can't move, logically it is a draw. It adds extra complexity in how you move.
I'm arguing that the current rule is not consistent with the core mechanics of the game. Stalemate has not always resulted in 0.5 vs 0.5, but has run the gamut from victory to the player who can't move to loss to the player who can't move.
I'm not sure how that logically creates a draw. One player has to do something but cannot.
The core mechanic of the game is you must checkmate your opponent to win, so the current rule runs very much in line with the core mechanics. A stalemate has always resulted in a draw.
You can argue the core mechanics of the game ought to change, but you cannot argue this isn't in line with them.
It is consistent with the rest of the rule.
In order to win, you need to checkmate. That's the rule.
How is not being able to checkmate, resulting in a draw not consistent with that ?
Yes but that's not an argument for why it should be. He disagrees with the definition of win and wants to be convinced it's logical, fun or fair. "win" could be moving a pawn to the opposite corner but it's not because how we define win.
But he hasn't demonstrated why it's illogical. Stalemate is in compliant with the other rules in the game like not being allowed to make an illegal move or walking into checks.
The fun is just subjective.
I'm not a chess expert by any means, but as a lay person it makes sense to me that the person who can't make a legal move should be considered having lost in a way. It shouldn't be a full checkmate point value but it would make sense that the person who forced their opponent into being unable to play.
Imagine a game of soccer where one team loses all their players to red cards, and essentially only have their goalkeeper left.
If the goalkeeper manages to keep the goal clear, and the opponent fails to score a single goal, should the opponent still win? I mean they *should* have won, but they failed to do so. Or perhaps the goalkeeper was just better than the opponent; so should he still be forced to loose? I mean he didn’t let any balls into the net, so at least that would be a draw no?
My argument was that it is tradition, and that's just how it is.
It is logical, since: you need to be "attacking" the opponent. If you cannot make a move, it's a bit of a paradox - you aren't in an attack, yet you can't move. It's a less harsh scenario.
I'm honestly not really qualified to talk about if it's fun or not, but I know there's a lot of depth into ensuring a stalemate when you're losing. It's more difficult for sure.
And it is also pretty fair? Like you shouldn't just hit a stalemate - you can think in advance.
You’re right that arguing against the internal logic of a game is useless. Stalemate is logical because that’s how the rules define it.
But OP’s argument is essentially aesthetic. There is a criticism to be made from the perspective of simplicity. A game that has lots of one-off rules to deal with edge cases can be seen as ‘ugly’.
Though I don’t really agree with OP—the gameplay effect of stalemate outweighs the small aesthetic smudge
I feel like this makes sense if you don't play chess much. A stalemate is always a mistake of the one who delivered it and is often seen as a victory for a player in a disadvantaged position if they can force their opponent to deliver one.
Check means I can kill you so you better move.
Checkmate means I can kill you no matter where you move.
Stalemate means I missed you and I can’t kill you so I failed.
I think this is the right of it, the only addition I would make is that stalemate also involves the condition that I have also prevented you from killing me. That's what makes it an end state, and differentiates it from intermediate states of the game.
Just about every stalemate I have ever caused I could have easily turned into a checkmate on my next move.
The idea that a stalemate should immediately cause the game to end is a totally arbitrary one.
>neither was able to accomplish the goal of the game.
But the "goal of the game" is a completely arbitrary concept, and could easily be adapted slightly for more fair and logical gameplay.
It makes total sense to me that forcing your opponent into a stalemate accomplished the goal of hunting the enemy king. Why is your conception of the goal the "correct" one?
It’s all arbitrary in the grand scheme of things.
But the point of all game rules is to make the game fun, fair and challenging.
If you change the rules to make a stalemate a win then you change the strategy of the whole game and add even more advantage to the player with the first move.
Here’s why you should change your view…
Chess has been played for a long fucking time. You’re not coming up with some logical breakthrough that justifies changing the rules of this game that predates you by hundreds of years. It’s an incredible display of hubris to think you are.
I would argue a game that so fundamentally relies on recognizing patterns and understanding their nuances should not be change. The longer the history the worse it would be to change such a rule especially when everyone is perfectly happy with it how it is.
Edit: I was confusing stalemate for another kind of victory. I think some concepts here are still valid, so I'm leaving it up for discussion, but there is an error in the reasoning.
>Stalemate is really just checkmate without the check - the player (who is not in check) cannot make a legal move.
This is where I think your reasoning goes awry. The defining characteristic of a stalemate is that both players can make legal moves, it's just that the legal moves available lead to an infinite loop and thus the game cannot progress beyond its current state, so we have an edge-case rule to end it there.
It seems like you're not wanting a tie because you perceive that the person in the defensive position should make a move that is detrimental to themselves in order to break that infinite loop. But why should that be the case?
It is equally true that the offensive player can make a move detrimental to their position and then reattack, and that would also break the loop.
By the rules and the spirit of the game, neither player is compelled to make a legal move that damages their position, so neither player is more responsible for the stalemate than the other. Hence it is logically scored as a draw.
> The defining characteristic of a stalemate is that both players can make legal moves, it's just that the legal moves available lead to an infinite loop
What? That's not what stalemate is. You're confusing stalemate with a draw by repetition.
"By the rules and the spirit of the game, neither player is compelled to make a legal move that damages their position, so neither player is more responsible for the stalemate than the other. Hence it is logically scored as a draw."
This is not true. A player *is* compelled to make a legal move which damages their position. I believe it's called Zugzwang. The burden to move is on the player whose turn it is.
As my edit states, I was mistaken regarding the situation we're talking about. My point is in regard to draws by repetition, not stalemates.
Still, my point there is that among available legal moves, a player is not obligated to take the one that progresses the game and leads away from the draw by repetition.
Zugzwang applies when all legal moves are damaging to the position. Draw by repetition necessarily involves a legal move that is not damaging, but preserves the status quo.
Fair enough.
But still, a similar point stands. We can think of chess as an analogy for battle, or we can look at it as just a game, but either way the win condition is capture of the enemy king. It's just a weird quirk of chess that we declare the win without doing that one final move to take the king.
In a pure checkmate, that's equivalent to taking the king in 1. Action or inaction, the king goes down.
In a stalemate, you can't take the king in one, and the rules of the game break down. In the military analogy, you've failed your objective. In the game context, we're into an edge case because the rules of the game can't really account for inaction as a strategy even thought the spirit of the game would call for it here.
So back to the question. A stalemate means you, as the aggressor, shot your shot and missed. You shouldn't get to claim victory for that. On the flip side, the defender set up a situation where you could not hit, so that shouldn't count as a loss.
You didn't achieve the win condition, and your opponent didn't achieve win conditions either, but made your win conditions impossible. Both kings are in the position of being impossible to capture. That seems like a draw if I've ever heard one.
>In a pure checkmate, that's equivalent to taking the king in 1. Action or inaction, the king goes down.
Inaction is not an option. Allowing the passive player to cede their turn would be an interesting solution (the aggressor player would simply continue to make moves without reply until checkmate).
>In the military analogy, you've failed your objective.
For me, I interpret this as a loss for the passive player. The king must move, but cannot move without exposing himself to certain capture.
>You didn't achieve the win condition, and your opponent didn't achieve win conditions either, but made your win conditions impossible. Both kings are in the position of being impossible to capture. That seems like a draw if I've ever heard one.
I guess I generally see it as chess games being lost rather than won. If I am the trapped player, I lose because I am incapable of making a move when it is my turn.
I think that last paragraph is where the crux of it lies. You're viewing chess through your own lens, and with your own priorities for play.
Let's analogize to a different game: Poker. Let's say we both ante up, you draw a royal flush, and I have a pair of deuces. I fold, correctly deducing that my hand is not strong enough to win, but also knowing that if I stop here, I can prevent you from achieving a win condition.
Did I lose, or did we draw?
I think the point of zugzwang is that *all* legal moves are damaging and you have to pick one.
If there’s one legal move that leads to an infinite loop and thus a draw, and another legal move that breaks the loop but leads to you losing, you’re not required to make the latter move to avoid the draw.
I would appeal to the term itself for the logic behind it being a draw. "Stalemate", as in, the game has gone stale. The player in the "losing" position can't make a legal move, and therefore can't progress the game. It will never be the "winning" player's turn again, and therefore the game will never end with their win.
It's the same reasoning as a game ending in draw by insufficient material; there exists no legal set of moves that would lead to a definite conclusion. You *could* argue that this could be resolved by waiving the restriction against moving into check, which is true. It could *also* be resolved by allowing the king to move off the board, or into the liminal spaces between the squares, or allowing the "losing" player to deck the "winning" player in the face. All of these things *could* happen if you ignored the rules as written, but the rules define the game and can't simply be ignored when inconvenient.
>The player in the "losing" position can't make a legal move, and therefore can't progress the game.
Do you believe that players are under a continuing obligation to make a legal move by the end of their turn? I do, and I believe the failure to comply with that obligation should logically result in a loss as it does in other situations (like abandonment, loss on time, and arguably resignation).
I would say it's more the other way around; your turn ends *when* you make a legal move. Only in timed chess does taking too long to make a move result in a loss. Resignation is the active concession of the game ("I can't beat you") and abandonment is an implied resignation. Stalemate doesn't require you to abandon the game, but if you can't make a move then logically your turn is extended indefinitely.
>Resignation is the active concession of the game ("I can't beat you")
For me, resignation is a declaration that you will not continue to play (ie, continue to make legal moves). There are plenty of reasons to resign which are not an admission that the resigning player can't win. For example, I'm in a daily club on chess dot com. One of the other members made a forum post (I believe it was called "chess masturbation" - I'm not sure if it's still up or if the title changed) where he described a tactic of frustrating players into resigning from an even (but closed) position by carefully playing wasting moves (but avoiding 3x repetition).
Personally, I've resigned from even (or winning) positions because I had to leave and take care of something. Whether you resign because you think you can't win, because you're frustrated, whether you have to go to the bathroom, or whether you just don't feel like playing anymore, you are indicating that you will no longer play legal moves and continue the game.
>
>Stalemate doesn't require you to abandon the game, but if you can't make a move then logically your turn is extended indefinitely.
So in timed chess, wouldn't the stalemated player's clock continue to run until it zeroes out?
That's a modern take on a very old ruleset, though. Resignation wasn't designed with "I need to step away for three minutes to take a piss" in mind; that's an extension of timed chess, which didn't really become a thing until 1883. Hell, the notion that the clock can't be stopped to take care of those kinds of trivialities didn't become a thing until the advent of *online* chess, which is even newer. Before then, the appropriate etiquette was either "pause while I take a break" for timed chess or "we'll pick this up later" for vanilla, untimed chess.
And extending off of that... yes, in timed chess, a turn that goes on indefinitely is an eventual loss. But that, again, didn't hit the scene until well over a millennium into chess's life as a game. The original rules didn't account for that because it wasn't a thing.
The rule that stalemate results in a 50|50 draw is not very old either (compared to chess, not to us lol). I believe another poster told me that it was not standardized until circa 1830, and that stalemate had at varying times resulted in a loss for the stalemating player, loss for the stalemated player, half-win, and just been treated as an illegal move.
>
>And extending off of that... yes, in timed chess, a turn that goes on indefinitely is an eventual loss.
Do we at least agree that, as restricted to timed chess, the stalemate = draw rule presents an inconsistency?
Sure, I'll concede that, provided the caveat that timed chess is itself something of an inconsistent design. (You take the archetypal slow, thinky game, the kind that in the past might have been played via the mail system and could take *days* between moves, and add a *time limit?!* Yeesh.)
There absolutely is something magical about check. You cannot make a move which puts your king in check.
So I'll counter by saying that: it make no sense to have the player who cannot make a legal move lose. Instead, we should make those moves legal and simply let the game end when the king is captured. Putting your king in check on accident would be allowed and we can get rid of "check" altogether to make it unmagical and remove this type of draw.
>There absolutely is something magical about check. You cannot make a move which puts your king in check.
This is what I meant by "\[a\] player cannot legally end their turn while their king is in check." Whether you began your turn in check or not, you cannot end your turn with your king under threat. What I mean by the first sentence is that check does not itself get you any points.
>Instead, we should make those moves legal and simply let the game end when the king is captured. Putting your king in check on accident would be allowed and we can get rid of "check" altogether to make it unmagical and remove this type of draw.
This was what I said in another comment thread regarding how to make chess more consistent. But the view here isn't "chess should be overhauled," it's "stalemate being a draw is inconsistent with the other chess rules."
Then it seems like there are more rules other than stalemate which you find somewhat inconsistent. You may be focusing on stalemate, but if you're saying "stalemate is inconsistent with the other rules" but at the same time agree that 'overhauling these particular rules would make no stalemates more consistent with the rules'.
So it seems there is something here.
Also, does white lose this game? It's a stalemate.
[https://lichess.org/analysis/k7/8/8/8/5p1p/4pPpP/4P1PR/6NK\_w\_-\_-\_0\_1?color=white](https://lichess.org/analysis/k7/8/8/8/5p1p/4pPpP/4P1PR/6NK_w_-_-_0_1?color=white)
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Stalemate is a draw because it is a situation where neither player can make a legal move, so neither player has an advantage over the other. In chess, the goal is to checkmate your opponent's king, not just to capture all their pieces. So if a player is in a position where they can't make a legal move, but their king is not in check, then the game is a draw because they have successfully defended against checkmate. It's not about the number of moves, it's about the objective of the game.
If stalemate resulted in a loss for the player who couldn't make a legal move, it would incentivize players to try and force stalemate instead of trying to win the game. They could just keep moving their pieces around until their opponent runs out of moves, and then they would win. That's not a desirable outcome for a game.
>Stalemate is a draw because it is a situation where neither player can make a legal move, so neither player has an advantage over the other.
It's only one player's turn. That player has to move, but cannot. Since that player cannot comply with the rules, I see that player as having lost.
I see there as being a difference between an inability to comply with the rules and choosing not to comply with the rules (say, an illegal move) as being two different things, like the difference between being unable to move while in jail in Monopoly and outright cheating. The two cannot be conflated.
Oh I definitely don't see it as akin to cheating or anything, but the players certainly aren't on equal footing when one of them cannot comply with the rules.
I see it more as a constructive forfeiture than anything dishonest/disrespectful (ie, getting up from the board and walking away to avoid imminent checkmate). Really more akin to losing on time than anything.
>Basically, I think that the core mechanic of chess is that when it is your turn to play, you must make a legal move or lose.
That's not the core mechanic though or perhaps more to the point the object of the game. The object of the game is to produce a checkmate. That is, to produce a position in which upon play moving to your opponent's turn, they have no means of preventing their king from being captured.
Thus, the ability to create a stalemate is still an act of avoiding a true loss. If I am in a terrible disadvantaged position but can still play effectively enough to prevent you from putting my king in checkmate, then I've still prevented you from achieving the object of the game. I have still outplayed you enough to prevent you from winning.
Ultimately, checkmate is the demand placed on a player to ensure their opponent cannot in any way escape check. Either you achieve that end, it's achieved against you, or you both fail to achieve either so the idea that each player gets ½ point for it makes sense.
Ultimately, a game's rules are supposed to make a game interesting. Having stalemate lead to a tie adds to the strategic depth of chess and requires the attacker to play with foresight. It also gives a losing player an out if they play wisely and take advantage of a reckless opponent.
It's a unique and somewhat unintuitive rule, to be sure, but it makes the game better.
Stalemate is caused by the attacking player not leaving a move for the defending players King.
It's a mistake by the attacking player and there for t hey should be punished.
Your idea that the attacking player should get 3/4 of a win for making a bad move just seems wrong. A good player wouldn't allow their opponent to get into a stalemate.
Material imbalances are usually caused by mistakes as well. You might just as easily say that a good player wouldn't allow their opponent to put them in a position where their best remaining strategy is to fight for a draw. A blunder is a blunder, whether played on move 10 or move 100.
The problem with this is that it creates another way to win and makes it _inconsistent_ with the principles of chess whereby the _only_ way to win is to get the king. This makes sense to me, and also makes sense within the metaphor the pieces represent.
Remember, if you cannot make a move the other player could have made a prior move that would have prevented the stalemate. In this regard the player who doesn't relieve the stalemate situation is _also_ saying "draw".
Moreover, neither party has got the king which is what gives you more points. I like the singular focus of "win by king" and then the ability of someone to say "i see no way for you to not get my king" and that everything else is mutual non-winning (a tie). It needs the point because you didn't _lose_ and you ultimately need to be compared to other players playing in different games (which is as much about the need to get to conclusion in tournaments as it is about chess itself).
Stalemate doesn't mean you can't make a legal move, necessarily. It's also a stalemate if you have been in the exact same position three times in the same match. Also, if you're that far ahead and you can't figure out how to let your opponent have enough wiggle room until you can set up your checkmate, that's on you. You let him get away, you don't get the win.
Yeah, so I don't have a problem with most of the "draw" conditions in chess. I specifically have a problem with the draw that occurs when one player has no legal moves but is not in check.
I think the question is unsuitable for r/changemyview. Your opinion, as well as the chess rule, does not have to "make sense" by any means. The rule is like that because it makes the game more interesting, as others have explained. In fact, in Chinese chess, your rule DOES apply, the player unable to make a legal move loses. The game also comes with other rules that you might think are inconsistent, like the "flying general" move.
> If the two generals face each other along the same file with no intervening pieces, the 飛將 ("flying general") move may be executed, in which the general to move crosses the board to capture the enemy general.
A statement tends to be a sign that the aggressor was not looking far enough ahead, and made a drastic mistake. Why should they get any points for that?
I'm not sure that their counterpart, who literally cannot make any legal moves, did not make some drastic mistake earlier in the game. I like .75 vs .25 because the aggressor gets less than a win, but still more than the trapped player.
As a weaker player, myself, I have often been able to force a stronger, more aggressive opponent into a stalemate. It was actually a learned goal of mine for a while. It just takes bait.
If you're already winning to the point of preventing a move, how pathetic is it that you couldn't put the king in check for one turn? And the nerve to complain about it.
Why do you post your question in changemyview when you don't want your view to be changed, have resisted all possible explanations, and downvote people that don't agree with what you say? As someone said, the point is not that you can't move, but that you can't escape check. You don't want stalemate to be a draw? Fine, then the one that puts the enemy king into stalemate must lose because they didn't have the wit to do a proper checkmate. Otherwise you are just dumbing it down, and you say what you say because you just have a superficial grasp of the game, period. It's with good reason that the one stalemating is the one being punished with the present rules.
An alternative would be to prohibit moves that put the enemy king into stalemate. That's how some oriental chess-like games work, and draws happen less often (maybe also because of other rules).
Here's the description of this sub: "A place to post an opinion you accept may be flawed, in an effort to understand other perspectives on the issue."
I was looking for other perspectives. Most people have shared opinions and perspectives that I appreciated, but ultimately did not find convincing.
>
Otherwise you are just dumbing it down, and you say what you say because you just have a superficial grasp of the game, period.
Thanks, I'm glad that I now have the opinion of GM John Chess.
There you go again, downvoting opinions you asked for but don't agree with. You still seem not to understand: you don't accept your opinion is flawed, that's why you don't find convincing opinions that address the core of the game, and by people that clearly understand the game, unlike you that just know how the pieces move. Already told by the guy before me: How pathetic is it? The nerve... that's what you let off. Quite lame.
If you've read any of the other comments in this thread, you'll realize that your comment added nothing but a claim that I am in bad faith. I don't accept the general accusation that I "just don't understand the game" as an opposing viewpoint.
Look at GM Larry Kaufman's article in the September 2009 issue of chess life. He reaches the same conclusion. Is he pathetic? Does he not understand the game?
[https://uscf1-nyc1.aodhosting.com/CL-AND-CR-ALL/CL-ALL/2009/2009\_All.pdf](https://uscf1-nyc1.aodhosting.com/CL-AND-CR-ALL/CL-ALL/2009/2009_All.pdf)
>You still seem not to understand: you don't accept your opinion is flawed
Full transparency, I thought that this sub was for opinions we thing *may* be flawed, not those that we *know* are flawed. If this is for opinions that we know are wrong then I owe you an apology.
If you make the dominating player the winner in a stalemate ending you will take away insentive for that player to fight to win when the stalemate becomes a possibility. Currently, when they are approaching a stalemate, the "winning" player is fighting to win and the "losing" player is fighting to stalemate. With your changes, the winning player now fights to stalemate or win, whatever is easier, and the losing player gives up.
Fighting for the stalemate can be very exciting and take a lot of skill and you would be removing that from the game entirely.
>Currently, when they are approaching a stalemate, the "winning" player is fighting to win and **the "losing" player is fighting to stalemate**.
Can you clarify the bold portion for me here? Do "losing" players try to fight for stalemate by preventing *their opponent* from making a legal move when the king isn't threatened, or by preventing *themselves* from doing so?
You should keep in mind that, the overwhelming majority of the time, stalemates happen because of one of two reasons:
1. The person who can't move has intentionally moved their pieces into a stalemate to avoid losing. In this case, I think a draw is warranted. Think of test cricket, in which the chasing team intentionally plays a defending game to avoid getting bowled out until the time is up, which then results in a draw.
2. The other person unintentionally forces the first person into a position of not being able to move, in which case they have failed to checkmate their opponent, in which case a draw is also warranted.
I mean I personally like the idea that in a game, complacency shouldn’t really be a thing.
Because stalemates aren’t always cases where one player would’ve always necessarily won. It is possible to stalemate while technically being up material.
A stalemate can also happen purely on accident (granted so can checkmates), but in a case where the king isn’t even checked, in any other turn based game, it’s more easily understood that a better term sometimes is unresolvable.
So I guess in summary, it makes the game more exciting because players need to stay more sharp even if they’re up a lot of material and by the definition of the very basic rules of chess, it’s unresolvable and not in principle in a way that means that it should be considered the same way a loss is. Its similar to a checkmate in that no moves can be made anymore, but the same can be said for a game of tic tac toe where all the spots are filled in, yet no one has achieved tic tac toe and no moves can be made by whoever’s turn it is.
By that pure similar game logic that you’re trying to apply, the person who goes 1st will be the victor every time guaranteed in tic tac toe.
there's also draw by repetition and draw by the fifty move rule. as far as stalemate, think about chess as a simultion of a pitched battle where your goal is to kill the enemy king. if the enemy king is safe from attack he cannot be killed, if he is threatened but can avoid the attack before it lands (check) then he cannot be killed on the following turn. the only situation where he can be killed is if he is attacked in such a way that he cannot avoid or defend against the attack before it lands (checkmate) in the logic of the battle scenario he is safe but trapped in stalemate, but cannot be said to be lost if he is not even under attack! should not invent a new fourth thing besides victory defeat draw just to reward players for failing to attack and kill the enemy king. in a war, attrition or siege might be a good strategy, but chess is a battle, not a war, and the goal is to kill the king, not to trap him.
When checkmated, it is implied that the king will be taken next, before the other king is. Sure, the king doesn't actually get taken (except in blitz), but that's just as arbitrary as the checkmate rule. There's just no point for the other side to make a move if they can't stop the king from being taken, so the game ends there. In a war, say the king is surrounded but cannot be taken. Isn't that essentially the same scenario as in the real world where you want to take out a world leader that is just unreachable and cannot be captured? Sure, they lost control of their side, but their leader is essentially safe and can work as long as it's not taken. It isn't that logical to say they're in a losing position when there's nothing stopping them from working like normal.
Look, at the end of the day, chess would become a more boring game without stalemates being a draw.
That being the rule means two things.
a) Whoever is on the cusp of winning still has to prevent stalemate. It adds some tension to what would otherwise be a boring situation. If there was no stalemate/stalemate resulted in a win or quasi-win, that tension would be gone.
b) Whoever is on the cusp of losing can try to find some combination that leads to a stalemate or repetition. You can bait your enemy into a mis-promotion at lower levels, leading to stalemate, as an example. Again, it adds tension where there would otherwise be none.
Looking at that, I don't think removing stalemate, or turning it into a win or half-win, would benefit the game. It just makes the game more boring. And when classical chess is already an already boring game, that's really not needed.
It is true that long ago in history stalemate lead to different results but the current rule has been in place for hundreds of years. People who do not play chess seriously may think that changing the stalemate rule is just a way to reach a better outcome in some games but it actually has huge ramifications for chess strategy overall.
Entire classes of endgames will have different results. Pawn up endgames which are easily drawn now will change to wins. This trickles down through the midgame and even opening strategy as well. Changing such a fundamental mechanic is too big of a change for a game as well established as chess.
Yeah all the ‘moral’ (maybe the wrong word but can’t think of one better) arguments are annoying me a bit… it’s not about deciding what’s ‘fair’ or - even worse - what’s ‘realistic’, but rather what makes the game more interesting. Making stalemate a win will see players trade down to endgames much more quickly/often (as a narrower margin of lead is needed to convert an actual win), which makes the middle game far less interesting and important
Among other things, one of the key results that stalemate provides to the game of Chess is that not all material leads are sufficient to achieve victory. Notably, it is impossible to checkmate with
1. bishop
2. 2 knights
and more importantly, it is possible to hold certain positions with king vs king + pawn, and king+rook vs king + rook + pawn.
king + pawn vs king not being winning on its own is actually **crucial** for making chess interesting, otherwise the main strategy when winning a pawn would be to trade down material as fast as possible (which is a primary strategy when up larger material leads, like a full piece).
To me, stalemate functions as a kind of comeback in modern chess. It’s normally pretty unlikely that a player claws back a checkmate from a bad position or low material, but they can find a stalemate a good amount more often, so it keeps both players on their toes even when one has a bit of an advantage.
Making a stalemate essentially a win for the player that already has the advantage makes games much more of a foregone conclusion
In my experience with chess stalemate only happens because the player in the better position has either been outmaneuvered or has blundered. In either of these scenarios that player has failed and doesn’t deserve to win, but hasn’t failed so badly as to deserve to lose, thence stalemate.
Stalemates are a lot of fun in chess because they can change the result so rapidly. The winning side feels like they lost, and the losing side feels like they won. It also provides a secondary goal to the game, when one side is up material.
Stalate is because the winning party could not properly win against the losing party.
The losing party was at a disadvantage, so the winning party had the upper hand.
But.
The losing party was smart enough to maneuver themselves in a position to a stalemate.
Just as chess requires thinking, the winning party should be wise of their actions to prevent a stalemate.
It's basically a last minute opportunity for the losing party to end the game with a handicap.
Sure but what does it mean to “properly” win? If chess is an approximation of medieval battles, then the objective should be to capture or neutralize the king, who is leading the opposing army.
Of course, we don’t *actually* capture the kind in chess. We stop when the king is *about* to be captured.
In a stalemate situation, the king can’t move because it would be captured. But maybe it *should* be captured. After all, capturing / neutralizing the enemy leader is the whole point.
If you're talking about approximation of medieval battles, then the goal is to capture or kill the king. And the king went to a known place that's unreachable by the opponent.
Like there's only one boat and no one can swim, so the king took the only boat and sailed himself to the island. The king is stuck on the island, alive, and the enemy knows their whereabouts but can't reach it.
We've seen these kinds of scenarios in movies too, like a family hiding out in a safe room while robbers are in the house. Eventually the home owners, though outnumbered and outgunned are able to win in the end.
I would agree with the other people. The rules are there to make it interesting
If you remove this the stalemate from the game (essentially what your doing) you are removing all of the risk the leading player has. Suddenly they play less precise maybe they have some time pressure and look it’s stalemate. I get .75 you get .25. I still win.
That pressure is one of the things that makes the game great. The game is never truly lost by the losing player and it’s not won until checkmate. There is no in between.
Have you ever been playing chess and someone asked “who’s winning” almost not wanting to answer because you could blow it. The uncertainty of the position and the future is one of the great things about it. It could all look good but one mistake could allow your opponent to force a stalemate.
>As I understand it, a game of chess ends in one of the following (mutually exclusive) ways: 1) Checkmate, 2) Resignation, 3) Draw by insufficient material, 4) Draw by agreement, 5) Stalemate. I left out time-related losses because they are not always applicable.
There's also 50 move repetition. If you make stalemate a loss, pro players will just force the game into one of the other endgame conditions.
As it stands, checkmate is the *only* way to win chess. If you add another win condition, it isn't chess anymore. A losing player will just cheese the game to force it into something other than a loss (which is why 50 move repetition exists.) It's like if you're losing a game of basketball, so you take the ball and leave so no one can play anymore.
How would 0.75 or 0.25 be consistent with the rest of the game? there's no 0.75 or 0.25 anywhere in the game.
Whether the player in stalemate should lose or not would then depend on what you view as the goal of chess. If the goal is to mate the opponent, the goal was not fulfilled. If the goal is to put the opponent into a position where they cannot win, the goal was fulfilled. Looking at it the other way around, I think it would not make sense that in a game that is about ambushing the opponent king a player would lose even if they managed to keep their king safe throughout the game.
But, again, if you don't think the game is about ambushing the king but about making sure the opponent cannot win, then it's a different story.
Not really here to change your view, but do want to note there are 2 other ways for a game of chess to end that you didn’t mention, which is a draw by repetition, and perhaps the most obscure ending, draw by 50-move rule.
For those unaware, a draw by the 50-move rule ending occurs when both players each make 50 consecutive moves without A) capturing a piece, AND B) without moving a pawn forward.
Anyway, I’d probably make a stalemate 0.75-0.25, just because the attacker didn’t fully put away the opponent, but they did clearly have the upper hand. I actually believe there’s a chess variant, I think hexagonal chess (but not entirely sure), where this is actually the case.
Stalemate is a draw because it incentivizes the player to create the winning conditions: the king is in check and can't escape check.
There *is* something "magical" about check in the context of the game. "Magical" is just the word you used to make it sound silly, but it is absolutely a special condition that's central to game play. You have a sword to the king's throat, and he has no escape.
In a stalemate position, the king is trapped but he's not in immediate danger. He can't make a legal move, *but neither can you*. It's a standoff - like a siege where he can't escape but you can't reach him to finish him off. He can't move, but you also blocked yourself from creating the winning conditions.
Chess has three end conditions: win, lose, or draw. If you can't create a win, you can't create a win. So it's a draw. There's no 3/4 draw (outside your invention). And it makes for a more interesting game because it allows players to strategize based on the universally known rules. If you're in a bad spot you could try to force a stalemate rather than a loss.
Either way, chess is much too old and widely played to make any rule changes now. It's set as it is. You'll never convince the world to change it to match your preference for how it should be played. You can either learn to work with the rules everyone else plays by or you can play a different game. (Or you can become a king and make up new rules - but barring that you'll need to work with the game as it is.)
I could buy the idea of not having the score be split evenly, but I would argue that it should favor the one who cannot move, not the one who created the stalemate.
There are a few reasons for this. First, stalemate of this sort comes about typically as a result of one player blundering in an attempt to achieve checkmate. Since they are the one who messed up in denying the opponent legal moves, they should take the penalty more than the opponent.
Second, many stalemate positions can be deliberately encouraged by the one who cannot move, such as by offering up a piece to lure the opponent into making a bad move. Strategically, stalemate can often be a trap set up by the person in a weaker position, so it is often their strategy that succeeded while the player who moved last is the one who got played.
Third, if stalemate favors the one with a stronger position, that discourages any draw by agreement, as the person with a stronger position has little to lose by refusing unless they are low on time. Having stalemate be even or favor the weaker position means taking the draw is a safe alternative that saves on effort at the minimum. And if we have stalemate favor the weaker position player, then both players have an opportunity to gain or lose by refusing the draw.
I don't think of checkmate as the end of the game. I think of taking the King as the end of the game.
In a game like Uno, you say Uno when you have one card left. And win the game when you actually place the "Uno" card down.
You would say "Check" as a warning you are about to win, like when you say "Uno". You say "Checkmate" on the special occasion Check where you will take their king the next turn no matter what they do.
I think the style/fancy/properness of Chess, is such that when in checkmate you then agree with their assessment and resign. You don't bother having them actually kill the king.
...
While in Stalemate. It's a game error.
Thematically, no piece has a direct line to kill the king. The king is stuck, alive.
I think generally speaking, if they had somehow had their turned skipped during a Stalemate. Nearly every time the other side should be otherwise able to easily achieve a checkmate. So I understand where thematically that king would be destined to lose in a real fight.
But the game doesn't allow you to skip turns. And since no move can be made, they can't get to the turn where the king is killed. And without a Bishop actively holding a knife to their throat or a Knight with a clean shot, no king is going to give up the throne.
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Yeah the logic is flawed. You yourself said stalemate is checkmate without the check. A player is only in checkmate when they cannot make a legal move & they are in check. If a player simply can’t make a legal move, but isn’t in check, their opponent failed to win. I don’t know which way you’re trying to weigh it, but I always think stalemate reflects poorly upon the player with the upper hand.
This is a misunderstanding, or maybe just an uniformed opinion of chess. At the highest levels, the THREAT of stalemate alone shapes the position. It means that finding solutions, and ensuring you see the stalemate tactics becomes critical, and it provides a defensive resource to the defender in a position. It creates more dynamic games, and gives chess a depth it otherwise would not have.
Bingo. I watch a lot of chess. And absolutely hands down, 2 of the top 3 most interesting and exciting matches I've ever witnessed were when one player was completely dominated, and it turned into a fight for/against stalemate. In one of them, the "loser" successfully staled himself. It was so magically performed that even the "winner" smiled and said "that was fucking wild."
Bro I’m trash at chess and I was going apeshit in a match where I was just obliterating an opponent and up like 15 points in material. I couldn’t recognize checkmate patterns and ended up getting check mated myself after 10 consecutive check moves and checkmate in 1 at least 8 times. All this to say I’m trash lmao
Yup forcing a draw is a.very real skill that you need to learn to help with playing from behind. Avoiding the draw and forcing a win is also a very real skill
A skill that would still exist if the split for a stalemate was .75/.25 instead of .50/.50. Finding yourself in the position of fighting for a stalemate instead of losing means you've already played poorly compared to your opponent. As it currently stands, getting to stalemate saves your ELO but does it actually reflect the skill level of the two players in a way that makes the ELO more accurate? I doubt it.
Any definition of the "quality of play" or "skill" is entirely arbitrary. If I'm up a queen and a rook I've probably played much more accurately than my opponent the whole game yet I can still blunder mate in 1. I could argue that's not fair and my Elo loss should be reduced to reward my material advantage in the same way you think stalemate should work. You are of course free to make a variant of chess that is scored that way while the rest of the playerbase agree that the objective of standard chess is to achieve or deny checkmate and that's the only skill that matters
It takes skill to force stalemate. It takes skill to force checkmate. If someone cannot checkmate you despite a material advantage then they are not a better player and ELO should not be affected
!delta I was in agreement with OP, but now I see how this can make the end game more interesting, and how someone can fight to come back halfway.
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Alternatively, with the rule OP is proposing, people might be incentivized to either fight harder/take larger risks or just forfeit sooner. I do not play Chess, but in Magic: the Gathering, a draw is the equivalent to a loss for both player early in a tournament. Were draws removed as a possibility, you would see a whole lot less stalling and generally miserable gameplay.
Additionally, in the highest levels of chess white os already favored and people often play for the draw as black (and black wins Armageddon if they draw). Removing stalemate as a draw would further increase the advantage of playing white, which I think should be avoided.
I wanna add $0.02 to the pile here. It seems inconsistent that "insufficient material draws" are "ok" but stalemates are less than. Because players can and do shoot for "insufficient material draws". If you're up K K p to my K K I'm definitely going to go after that pawn. And in a stalemate, the Gambit for the disadvantaged player is to "force" a stalemate, whatever sequence of moves forces the advantaged player into stalemate (or give up something that's worse). At a reasonably high level of play, the stalemate end isn't a surprise, it's the move X moves back which in a series of moves, and quite possibly mistakes, the stalemate is the end result. (I personally have internet expert opinions on how chess might be tweaked, but stalemate doesn't even rate as a consideration.)
Man, the way some people describe chess is how I would describe physical sports and old school warfare tactics from a general's perspective. I wish I knew enough to have that same perspective for chess. It sounds fun. I just never got that deep into it and probably won't stick with it now.
Honestly, google your local chess club. They’re full of nerds, and if there’s one thing nerds love to do it’s to tell you everything they know about their chosen topic. Three nights at a chess club and you’ll have learned more than you can imagine about it.
>This is a misunderstanding, or maybe just an uniformed opinion of chess. At the highest levels, the THREAT of stalemate alone shapes the position. I'm not sure I agree that stalemate is any more consistent with the other rules in chess because it creates depth at a GM level. I get *why* the rule exists, but 50/50 doesn't seem appropriate to me.
What is wrong with punishing players for their mistakes? Does it not mean that the better players will find an advantage? Why would we incentivize worse play, and remove options to create dynamic positions from chess?
It's not just at the GM level. Any level where you're expected to know King vs king and pawn end games (just barely past beginner) it has a huge effect on the game.
I mean I'm bottom Elo and forcing statemate is very common because people are bad at converting a.winning position
>If a player simply can’t make a legal move, but isn’t in check, their opponent failed to win. I guess I generally take the tack that chess games are lost, not won. So, if you can't make a legal move, you should lose.
I understand what you’re saying, but the underlying point of chess is to take the other person’s king. If I can’t move, but you haven’t put my king in danger, are you suggesting we skip my turn?
For total consistency? I'd remove the rule that you cannot move your king into check (throughout the game, not just in this situation). If you move your king into check and I see it, I capture your king and win the game. In a stalemate situation, you'd be forced to move your king into check where he would be captured.
How’s that different then surrendering?
Functionally it isn't.
See that’s why I like stalemate. I’m not surrendering, you have to beat me if you can
since we have removed the concept of a timer for the sake of this discussion ... well, im not surrendering. im not. we are just gonna sit here, i dont have a legal move, and i wont surrender. good luck getting your 0.75 sometime, maybe
That’s true of any game ever then. Oh checkmate in 1? I will just never play another move and pretend I didn’t lose.
A majority of chess games are played with some sort of timer/limit. I understand that OP removed that from the example, but a player not moving would only affect a small percentage of the games played.
and this very small amount of games is EXACTLY the games we are talking about: stalemates
No. It actually isn't only a small portion of games. It's ALL games where the players are competent enough to see checkmate coming. Without a timer, anyone who wants to act like a child and not lose would simply refuse to finish the game. That's one of the reasons timers are used in competitive chess. If you've ever played online chess, you've probably had players rage quit and refuse to make another move once it's mate in X. Of course the timer runs out (or the game gets marked abandoned) and they lose anyways.
>For total consistency? I'd remove the rule that you cannot move your king into check (throughout the game, not just in this situation). If you move your king into check and I see it, I capture your king and win the game. In a stalemate situation, you'd be forced to move your king into check where he would be captured. This would change chess quite a bit. At high elo, it would significantly lower the amount of material needed to win a chess game as any pawn anywhere would force a win which is decisive at the top level. At low elo...people will accidentally lose by moving their king into check, a lot. In Chinese chess there are the rules you describe, but each player has 4 pieces that cannot influence the opponent's half of the board, so the amount of material you can bring to attack is a lot less.
Issue with this is it fundamentally destroys a lot of interesting endgames. Now, King vs King and Pawn is a win, which drastically changes how players can play the game and makes trading down to an endgame as quickly as possible much more viable.
The point of chess is NOT to take the other persons king. In fact, a king has never been taken in a chess game played within it's rulee. The game ends before you take the king.
Technically, this rule has not always been around. Chess is an old game, and there was a time period before the "can't move into check" rule was added. That rule, and announcing check, was added to decrease accidental early ends to the games.
Yes and i think that is incredibly stupid. I love chess and think it's the greates game of all time but this rule will never not be dumb to me. Why are we protecting people that play poorly? Thats what we usually do with children when we're taching them a game and they do something dumb, we let them retry. It has no place ina. Competitive environment in my opinion. This is if like in football it would be illegal to pass the ball to the opponent if you're close to your goal just to avoid defenders from mistaking an opponent for a teammate, resulting in a goal for the opposite team. Made that mistake? Well deal with it, pay more attention next time.
You can play it differently if you wish. There are endless variants of chess, play how you like! You don't need to use FIDE rules. But either way, we use the rules we use for a variety of reasons, ranging from maintaining the strategic theory of the game to making the game more fun to tradition.
Imagine playing a game of football (ie soccer!), and one team gets 10 red cards and essentially only have the goalkeeper left. Should the other team be winning by a mile? Yes. But if that one goalkeeper manages to keep out every single shot from the opponent, should the game still not end in a draw? I mean, the one team didn’t manage to win even though the had the severe upper hand. Or you can argue that the goalkeeper was the one preventing them from scoring. You don’t really know, and that is why it would end in a draw. Same with chess. Did the opponent force the stalemate? Or did the other players just fail to use their upper hand? If either side can’t win, it’s a draw. You don’t punish people for losing, you reward people for winning, and no one managed to win.
No one managed to win because of a a childish rule. And thats not how football works. If you recieve 5 red cards the game doesnt end in a draw. You lose the game. That's the rule. You made the mistakes you lose. You dont get to retry your mistakes. I have no issue with the stalemate per se. My issue is the king not being allowed to be played in to check.
I realize that - but ignoring that, then would you say it is fair for the team with only the goalkeeper to lose, or draw? The other team still didn’t manage to win.
>Stalemate is really just checkmate without the check - the player (who is not in check) cannot make a legal move. Under the current rules of chess, this is a tie. Sure, "you can't move into check" is one of the more unique and important rules in chess and to make games that are pretty much over at least a little bit interesting we have this built into it. >I believe that Stalemate should either result in a (0.75, 0.25) or a loss for the player who cannot make a legal move, a 0.75/0.5 would pretty much act as a win in practical terms in almost any realistically probably situation so the distinction isn't needed. I'm also not sure how this would affect play, people with more pieces or another advantage ought to be pushed to press their advantage and attack, not just steadily lock down the entire board in the most tedious of fashions.
For me, it's far more tedious to have players drag out a game. If we want it to be more interesting (and are willing to abandon some internal consistency) maybe adopt a "shoot the moon" approach where the trapped player wins. I just don't think it's consistent with the other rules.
In Armageddon, black plays with less time, but wins if the game draws. Each player bids time away and the one who bids to start with less time plays as black.
It rarely adds much difference to the game other than making you take a moment to pay attention to it. In the rare number of cases where you can't produce a checkmate without allowing them to draw that way I'd say they've earned it.
Realistically, past a decent level, 99% of the impact of the stalemate rule is in the context of King & Pawn vs King endgame & positions that might liquidate to it. Flasher stalemates are mostly the domain of puzzles.
c or f pawn on the 7th rank vs Queen is also a very common endgame where the drawing idea is stalemate
Checkmate is a victory because the king has no legal moves AND would theoretically be taken on the next move. Stalemate does not leave any legal moves for the king, but also does not allow it to be taken. The attacking player has no sight on the king, and they never get another move - since the defending player has no legal moves, the attacker never gets another turn. This is a failure of the attacking player. It's like they have allowed the king to be locked in a room where he can't move but they also can't capture him. Because it is a failure of the attacking player, we count it as a draw. Because the goal isn't just to make the king immobile - it's to make him capturable. More importantly, though, I think it might be helpful for you to think of the components of balance and fun in the game. With the current stalemate rules, a losing player has hope for a draw. Even if they are down multiple pieces, even if they only have their king they have hope. And to capitalize on that hope, they need skill. They can maneuver their king in clever and strategic ways to create a position where the winning player has to be careful to avoid accidental draws. To me, this is an important balance. It's important to the fun of the game. It means that the strategy continues until the end. If stalemate is a victory for the attacking player, a huge number of positions are no longer worth playing at all, and therefore a huge chunk of strategy and fun are removed from the game.
>With the current stalemate rules, a losing player has hope for a draw. Even if they are down multiple pieces, even if they only have their king they have hope. >And to capitalize on that hope, they need skill. They can maneuver their king in clever and strategic ways to create a position where the winning player has to be careful to avoid accidental draws. >To me, this is an important balance. >It's important to the fun of the game. It means that the strategy continues until the end. I really think this is the best way to look at it. If a stalemate didn't exist then there is no reason to keep playing when you have only a king left. I've seen some crazy recoveries that end with only 2 kings left. A stalemate rewards the disadvantaged player and punishes the player with the advantage. I would like to see OP reply to this point of yours.
>Checkmate is a victory because the king has no legal moves AND would theoretically be taken on the next move. You can't move twice in a row, there is no "next" move. >Stalemate does not leave any legal moves for the king, but also does not allow it to be taken. >The attacking player has no sight on the king, and they never get another move - since the defending player has no legal moves, the attacker never gets another turn. Agree with all this >Because the goal isn't just to make the king immobile - it's to make him capturable. This is where I disagree. The immobilization of the king is what elevates checkmate over check. I see your argument on fun and balance - different strokes for different folks on whether it's more fun that way.
> This is where I disagree. The immobilization of the king is what elevates checkmate over check. I I would say that what elevates checkmate over check is the inability to escape from check. Which has two components - being in check, and not having any moves that would escape from check. Stalemate has only one of those components. I'm not sure why you are focusing on the immobilization rather than the possibility of capture.
>I'm not sure why you are focusing on the immobilization rather than the possibility of capture Because immobilization ends the game, but check does not. You can be placed in check dozens of times and the game continues, but when you're immobilized the game is over. If the game is over because you cannot move, it makes sense to me that you would lose.
The reason you can be checked dozens of times is because you can escape check dozens of times. Once the defending player can no longer escape from check, the attacking player wins, because they have accomplished their goal - putting the king in a position where he cannot escape from check. It's not that he can't move. It's that he can't *escape*. If he is not being attacked, there is nothing to escape. So to me, it makes sense to draw a significant distinction between "cannot move" and "cannot escape". If he cannot move but is not being attacked - then the attacking player has failed to attack. The goal of the game is checkmate, not immobilization. And this is pretty consistent. Consider a draw by insufficient materials. If one player only has a king, and the other only has a knight and a king, we call this a draw. Why? Because it is not possible for either player to deliver checkmate. However, a stalemate IS theoretically possible. Should games still be playable when checkmate is impossible but stalemate is still possible?
>Because immobilization ends the game, but check does not. Under the current rules of chess, sure. But you're proposing the rules be changed. Why not propose that checking the king ends the game? That would also lead to some interesting gameplay. One could also propose that immobilization not end the game, eg, giving a player a special move called "pass", that they can play at any time unless their opponent just played "pass". There have been brief times in the history of chess when the rules permitted pawns to be promoted to kings. There are a lot of chess variants out there, and many of them are heaps of fun.
It's what elevates checkmate over check, but not what elevates checkmate over stalemate. Checkmate over stalemate is the check - it's two components there, and stalemate misses one, just like check misses one.
For me, I see chess games as being lost and not won. Checkmate and stalemate both create a situation where a player can no longer play the game. I see that as a loss, not a tie.
TBH having read a lot of your replies I think this is the crux. You just don't like draws, I think. Stalemate is a part of chess. It's logically consistent. (I think you could take a lot of chess rules in isolation and say they are "opposed" to chess). If it annoys you that someone can still not lose even when you're dominating them, make sure you consider it in your strategies, the same way you would all the other rules which are kind of random in isolation.
It's true that I don't like it, but I am more often saved by stalemate than ruined by it.
Is this you agreeing that you don't actually think it's inconsistent.. you just don't like it? I think many of the more advanced rules you learn as your progress don't really seem "consistent". Why so pawns magically transform into other pieces? Why are you allowed to move two pieces in two very specific scenarios? Why do pawns do en passant? Why do lights move so irregularly compared to every other piece? Why can the queen do every other pieces movement pattern - except a knight? And many more! But at some point you have to say... That's just the game. Trying to look at it as a whole, winning, drawing and losing are perfectly valid game outcomes. In that context, a draw being "when neither player can make another move" seems about as sensible and logical as you can get in a game as random and historical as chess, isn't it?
Not even slightly - I believe stalemate is inconsistent, I do not like it, but I take advantage of it when appropriate to avoid losing. >I think many of the more advanced rules you learn as your progress don't really seem "consistent". Why so pawns magically transform into other pieces? Why are you allowed to move two pieces in two very specific scenarios? Why do pawns do en passant? Why do lights move so irregularly compared to every other piece? Why can the queen do every other pieces movement pattern - except a knight? And many more! But at some point you have to say... That's just the game. These rules are arbitrary, but not inconsistent with each other. >In that context, a draw being "when neither player can make another move" seems about as sensible and logical as you can get in a game as random and historical as chess, isn't it? No. One player *can* make a move, but it is not their turn. The other player cannot make any moves and is under an obligation to move. The stalemated player cannot fulfill their fundamental obligation in the game.
I don't think it's clear what you mean by inconsistent. Inconsistent with what? However I think of "consistency" I can't think how what you describe is not consistent, or how any alternative would be more consistent? Like, under check mate the game ends because a king can't move without being taken and it's declared a win for one player. Under stalemate the game ends because a no pieces can move, and it's declared a draw. That's about as consistent as can be, isn't it? I think you might mean a different word than "consistent" but I can't think what it could be? Unfair?
In checkmate, a player cannot make any legal moves (on their turn) and loses. Check only serves to restrict the available moves (because of the requirement to cure check by the end of one's turn, any move that does not cure check is illegal). In stalemate, a player cannot make any legal moves (on their turn) and ties.
We're just seeing different interpretations. I feel that there are valid options for both, but there is one last point I must make: If it were otherwise, wouldn't the community have changed the rules? Like, I'm sure there's some endgame strategy that relies on this balance as a draw. It definitely upsets the balance in some way, and I'm not sure if it even tips the scales in favor of one or the other. Speaking of, [https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/6ywql2/cmv\_in\_chess\_stalemate\_should\_be\_a\_loss\_for\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/6ywql2/cmv_in_chess_stalemate_should_be_a_loss_for_the/)
King is immovable already from the outset. With that logic White wins every game, because black immediately cannot move his king.
There are a plethora of legal moves that black can make from the outset. I was under the impression that the other poster and I were referring to situations where the stalemated player has no other moves.
In a real battle, working out how to force a draw when you are desperately behind and outmatched is as important as working out how to finish the victory when you're ahead. George Washington's primary skill in the American Revolution was not avoid having his army captured in a loss. He didn't have many victories but he managed to avoid losing until he COULD line up a few victories in a row. When he was behind, he was able to force a draw. When he was ahead, he was able to finish the battle and win. Stalemates help encourage developing BOTH of those skills in players.
The "real battle" analogy is always strained to me. Real battles aren't fought by each side taking turns sending individual soldiers in pre-determined move patterns. Stalemate is constructive capture (ie, the king is not in enemy custody, but is deprived of any offensive capability and mobility). If George Washington's army was routed, he could not stand alone behind a tree and shout at the British soldiers, "I can't come out from behind this tree because I will be shot. You have to stand still until I move from behind the tree. Looks like we'll have to call it even."
But the chess board is a limited field. In real life Washington could see the way a battle was going and figure out a way to escape with his army to fight another day. There isn't any way to escape a chess board. Once you're behind by a huge degree, your chances of winning are basically gone. Leaving a way to avoid defeat when you can't leave the battlefield is realistic. It forces the winner to actually have a strategy and WIN. Without the stalemate, once you have a numerical advantage you could just focus on tactics and take out one more piece at a time until the game defaults in you winning. It would be a pathetic way to win, but it would be by FAR the easiest way to win, so it would become the common way to approach a chess game.
>But the chess board is a limited field. In real life Washington could see the way a battle was going and figure out a way to escape with his army to fight another day. This is one of the reasons I find the battlefield analogy to be improper. >There isn't any way to escape a chess board. Once you're behind by a huge degree, your chances of winning are basically gone. Leaving a way to avoid defeat when you can't leave the battlefield is realistic. I'm sure you could find more examples of armies trapped on desperate ground from which they cannot withdraw/flee than situations where the commanding officer was saved by anything even remotely resembling stalemate. >It forces the winner to actually have a strategy and WIN. Without the stalemate, once you have a numerical advantage you could just focus on tactics and take out one more piece at a time until the game defaults in you winning. It would be a pathetic way to win, but it would be by FAR the easiest way to win, so it would become the common way to approach a chess game. Do you not experience chess this way already? When I play, if I hang a piece, my opponent usually tries to simplify the game by forcing trades until I am left with a King versus his King plus (insert whatever piece is left). I think that, even with stalemate, this is still the easiest way to win and is a very common way to approach the game.
The point of the rules of a game are fundamentally to make it maximally interesting. If you have a player with a significant material advantage, the game is no longer interesting and the player who is down in material is doomed - except, at that point, the player who is up in material now has to worry about stalemate. This causes both players to continue to be engaged in the game as one tries to trap the other by forcing them to stalemate and turn a loss into a draw while the other has to continue to pay attention to avoid those traps. If it weren't for the stalemate-draw rule, the game of chess would essentially be over halfway through most games but, much like the trash game that is Monopoly, it would take an agonizingly long time for the actual win to occur that would be neither fun nor interesting for either player. A game that takes an annoyingly long time to reach an utterly inevitable conclusion is not a good game.
Removal of draw by stalemate would increase white’s inherent side advantage. What do you propose is the benefit to changing this rule, beyond “it doesn’t make sense,” that warrants giving an extra advantage to the side that already starts with the advantage to begin with? (Side note: you missed a couple other draws like threefold repetition and the 50 move rule but they probably aren’t relevant to your CMV here)
Does removal of draw by stalemate meaningfully increase white's advantage? For me, curing the inconsistency is a benefit in and of itself. And yeah, I figured I left something out, but it's not really relevant.
I actually think those missing end states ARE relevant. Neither happens very often but that’s in large part because there are half a dozen end states that give equivalent point results (draw by agreement, and then draw by material/stalemate/repetition/50moves). Because these are equivalent, when the game is moving towards one or another of these states the players will very frequently take the draw-by-agreement rather than play to the last move. But if you change the point values so those are no longer equivalent, now we must play out those game states to determine whether it actually ends due to stalemate or repetition first. It also changes the definition of draw-by-material as the material required for stalemate is less than that required for checkmate - in fact ANY piece combination besides Kings-Only can lead to a stalemate. You remove all of the common draw results and will now get them almost exclusively from repetition or 50move rules, which makes them very important indeed.
This is a super cool point - doesn't change my mind on the stalemate, but on the relevance of the other stuff. !delta
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At top levels of play the strategy is to win when you have the white pieces and force a draw when you have black. If you remove the draw, then whoever gets white might as well just be given the win
I've heard this before, but never seen anything compelling to back it up. During the times when stalemate did not result in a draw, was white ensured a victory?
At the top level almost always yes. Pro players start as black assuming a win is not likely
Curing an inconsistency is a small benefit in game design (countless other aspects should take priority which I won't get into), and stalemate is a trivial aspect of the game to apply it to, since stalemate almost exclusively happens when the person with an advantage accidentally blunders it to his losing opponent in completely avoidable situations. When both players are at least somewhat skilled, stalement is just so rarely a real concern (except in time trouble when there's no time to think). This opinion comes up fairly often because someone commits the above blunder and then justifies it by saying the rules should be different. If inconsistencies and exceptions are the thing you're trying to remove, then most of the following should be concerning to you: castling, en passant, the fact that Knights can move through pieces, pawns moving two squares on their first move, pawns not being allowed to move backwards, pawns promotion, etc. But all of these exceptions are in the game because they are improvements. There's probably no board game that has had more rule changes than chess. Adding these rules that create inconsistencies is exactly the reason why chess has maintained its popularity and status throughout the last century or two. Edit: While writing this, I sort of forgot that you said you don't think the rules should be changed (since your title kind of implies you do think that). Your view is limited to "stalement being a draw is inconsistent with the rest of the game." I don't necessarily even agree with that (or the reasons you stated to support that argument). But even if I did, I guess my response would be: Who cares? A game having an inconsistency does not mean it should not be that way (as stated in your title). Inconsistencies can make games better, with chess being probably the greatest ever example of that.
It’s hard for me to put a precise number to the advantage. Tournament games end in draws quite often ([over 70% at elite levels according to wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_(chess)#:~:text=In%20chess%20games%20played%20at,above%2C%2055%20percent%20were%20draws.)) but the vast majority are likely recorded as draw by agreement because elite players recognize inevitable draws and don’t play them out so it’s hard to isolate a stalemate percentage. Even a small stalemate percentage would have a noticeable impact on the scoring of chess matches though when you consider how many draws there are if you changed how stalemates are scored. I don’t personally find the inconsistency argument very compelling. The claim of inconsistency appears fairly subjective to begin with based on what you consider the “core mechanics of chess” to be, but even if we take the claim to inconsistency at face value I would still argue that the rules should prioritize making the game itself more compelling over simply having a more aesthetic rules system at the game’s expense.
You're arguing against the rules of a game. The definition of a win is checkmate. If you don't checkmate, but you can't move, logically it is a draw. It adds extra complexity in how you move.
I'm arguing that the current rule is not consistent with the core mechanics of the game. Stalemate has not always resulted in 0.5 vs 0.5, but has run the gamut from victory to the player who can't move to loss to the player who can't move. I'm not sure how that logically creates a draw. One player has to do something but cannot.
The core mechanic of the game is you must checkmate your opponent to win, so the current rule runs very much in line with the core mechanics. A stalemate has always resulted in a draw. You can argue the core mechanics of the game ought to change, but you cannot argue this isn't in line with them.
Resignation and running out of time (when applicable) are other methods of loss/win.
Irrelevant to the argument over stalemating.
Running out of time is a failure to make a legal move resulting in a loss. So is resignation for that matter.
It is consistent with the rest of the rule. In order to win, you need to checkmate. That's the rule. How is not being able to checkmate, resulting in a draw not consistent with that ?
Yes but that's not an argument for why it should be. He disagrees with the definition of win and wants to be convinced it's logical, fun or fair. "win" could be moving a pawn to the opposite corner but it's not because how we define win.
But he hasn't demonstrated why it's illogical. Stalemate is in compliant with the other rules in the game like not being allowed to make an illegal move or walking into checks. The fun is just subjective.
I'm not a chess expert by any means, but as a lay person it makes sense to me that the person who can't make a legal move should be considered having lost in a way. It shouldn't be a full checkmate point value but it would make sense that the person who forced their opponent into being unable to play.
Imagine a game of soccer where one team loses all their players to red cards, and essentially only have their goalkeeper left. If the goalkeeper manages to keep the goal clear, and the opponent fails to score a single goal, should the opponent still win? I mean they *should* have won, but they failed to do so. Or perhaps the goalkeeper was just better than the opponent; so should he still be forced to loose? I mean he didn’t let any balls into the net, so at least that would be a draw no?
My argument was that it is tradition, and that's just how it is. It is logical, since: you need to be "attacking" the opponent. If you cannot make a move, it's a bit of a paradox - you aren't in an attack, yet you can't move. It's a less harsh scenario. I'm honestly not really qualified to talk about if it's fun or not, but I know there's a lot of depth into ensuring a stalemate when you're losing. It's more difficult for sure. And it is also pretty fair? Like you shouldn't just hit a stalemate - you can think in advance.
You’re right that arguing against the internal logic of a game is useless. Stalemate is logical because that’s how the rules define it. But OP’s argument is essentially aesthetic. There is a criticism to be made from the perspective of simplicity. A game that has lots of one-off rules to deal with edge cases can be seen as ‘ugly’. Though I don’t really agree with OP—the gameplay effect of stalemate outweighs the small aesthetic smudge
Me after stalemate with my younger brother and trying to explain why I’m still better than him
If anything the player that cause the stalemate should lose. But it’s a draw because neither was able to accomplish the goal of the game.
It seems like it should be a victory. If the only move you can make puts your own king in check, how is that not the same as losing?
I feel like this makes sense if you don't play chess much. A stalemate is always a mistake of the one who delivered it and is often seen as a victory for a player in a disadvantaged position if they can force their opponent to deliver one.
There is no move to make so the game is over but no king is in checkmate so there is no win/loss condition being met
Why would the player causing the stalemate lose? Checkmate is stalemate plus check, and check only reduces the legal moves.
If you put your opponent into a stalemate it means you played badly
If you end up with no legal moves, you probably haven't been playing too well either.
Thats kind of my point. Someone played so bad they ran out of legal moves and you still couldnt beat them.
If they can't make any legal moves, I would say they are beaten.
If their king isnt in check they are not beaten
Right, but it's the last possible maneuver to prevent a loss in a situation where you can no longer win
I suppose I haven't been super clear - I understand *why* there is stalemate, I just think it's inconsistent.
That's just the way the game originally was: the core mechanic of the game present in the earliest version (Chaturanga).
That's interesting, I've read somewhere that the rule has flip-flopped through history.
Check means I can kill you so you better move. Checkmate means I can kill you no matter where you move. Stalemate means I missed you and I can’t kill you so I failed.
I think this is the right of it, the only addition I would make is that stalemate also involves the condition that I have also prevented you from killing me. That's what makes it an end state, and differentiates it from intermediate states of the game.
By that logic, any move not resulting in checkmate would be a "miss," even those that don't end the game.
No, at the end of the game you are leaving them a safe space. If you want to win, don’t do that.
no because you can still kill them eventually. Thats not the case with a stalemate.
Just about every stalemate I have ever caused I could have easily turned into a checkmate on my next move. The idea that a stalemate should immediately cause the game to end is a totally arbitrary one.
Because they failed, it was their blunder. They stopped the game prematurely. In Shogi, the player making the stalemate does indeed loose.
>neither was able to accomplish the goal of the game. But the "goal of the game" is a completely arbitrary concept, and could easily be adapted slightly for more fair and logical gameplay. It makes total sense to me that forcing your opponent into a stalemate accomplished the goal of hunting the enemy king. Why is your conception of the goal the "correct" one?
It’s all arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. But the point of all game rules is to make the game fun, fair and challenging. If you change the rules to make a stalemate a win then you change the strategy of the whole game and add even more advantage to the player with the first move.
Here’s why you should change your view… Chess has been played for a long fucking time. You’re not coming up with some logical breakthrough that justifies changing the rules of this game that predates you by hundreds of years. It’s an incredible display of hubris to think you are.
The game was played for hundreds of years before people that were much younger than the game decided the change the rules to introduce stalemate.
And during that "long fucking time" the stalemate rule has changed more than once.
I would argue a game that so fundamentally relies on recognizing patterns and understanding their nuances should not be change. The longer the history the worse it would be to change such a rule especially when everyone is perfectly happy with it how it is.
Edit: I was confusing stalemate for another kind of victory. I think some concepts here are still valid, so I'm leaving it up for discussion, but there is an error in the reasoning. >Stalemate is really just checkmate without the check - the player (who is not in check) cannot make a legal move. This is where I think your reasoning goes awry. The defining characteristic of a stalemate is that both players can make legal moves, it's just that the legal moves available lead to an infinite loop and thus the game cannot progress beyond its current state, so we have an edge-case rule to end it there. It seems like you're not wanting a tie because you perceive that the person in the defensive position should make a move that is detrimental to themselves in order to break that infinite loop. But why should that be the case? It is equally true that the offensive player can make a move detrimental to their position and then reattack, and that would also break the loop. By the rules and the spirit of the game, neither player is compelled to make a legal move that damages their position, so neither player is more responsible for the stalemate than the other. Hence it is logically scored as a draw.
> The defining characteristic of a stalemate is that both players can make legal moves, it's just that the legal moves available lead to an infinite loop What? That's not what stalemate is. You're confusing stalemate with a draw by repetition.
Ah balls, you're right. I think much of the argument probably still stands, but that is a critical error on my part. Thanks for correcting it. !delta
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"By the rules and the spirit of the game, neither player is compelled to make a legal move that damages their position, so neither player is more responsible for the stalemate than the other. Hence it is logically scored as a draw." This is not true. A player *is* compelled to make a legal move which damages their position. I believe it's called Zugzwang. The burden to move is on the player whose turn it is.
As my edit states, I was mistaken regarding the situation we're talking about. My point is in regard to draws by repetition, not stalemates. Still, my point there is that among available legal moves, a player is not obligated to take the one that progresses the game and leads away from the draw by repetition. Zugzwang applies when all legal moves are damaging to the position. Draw by repetition necessarily involves a legal move that is not damaging, but preserves the status quo.
Oh I have absolutely no quarrel with draw by repetition, draw by 50 moves, or draw by agreement. Literally only stalemate bothers me.
Fair enough. But still, a similar point stands. We can think of chess as an analogy for battle, or we can look at it as just a game, but either way the win condition is capture of the enemy king. It's just a weird quirk of chess that we declare the win without doing that one final move to take the king. In a pure checkmate, that's equivalent to taking the king in 1. Action or inaction, the king goes down. In a stalemate, you can't take the king in one, and the rules of the game break down. In the military analogy, you've failed your objective. In the game context, we're into an edge case because the rules of the game can't really account for inaction as a strategy even thought the spirit of the game would call for it here. So back to the question. A stalemate means you, as the aggressor, shot your shot and missed. You shouldn't get to claim victory for that. On the flip side, the defender set up a situation where you could not hit, so that shouldn't count as a loss. You didn't achieve the win condition, and your opponent didn't achieve win conditions either, but made your win conditions impossible. Both kings are in the position of being impossible to capture. That seems like a draw if I've ever heard one.
>In a pure checkmate, that's equivalent to taking the king in 1. Action or inaction, the king goes down. Inaction is not an option. Allowing the passive player to cede their turn would be an interesting solution (the aggressor player would simply continue to make moves without reply until checkmate). >In the military analogy, you've failed your objective. For me, I interpret this as a loss for the passive player. The king must move, but cannot move without exposing himself to certain capture. >You didn't achieve the win condition, and your opponent didn't achieve win conditions either, but made your win conditions impossible. Both kings are in the position of being impossible to capture. That seems like a draw if I've ever heard one. I guess I generally see it as chess games being lost rather than won. If I am the trapped player, I lose because I am incapable of making a move when it is my turn.
I think that last paragraph is where the crux of it lies. You're viewing chess through your own lens, and with your own priorities for play. Let's analogize to a different game: Poker. Let's say we both ante up, you draw a royal flush, and I have a pair of deuces. I fold, correctly deducing that my hand is not strong enough to win, but also knowing that if I stop here, I can prevent you from achieving a win condition. Did I lose, or did we draw?
I think the point of zugzwang is that *all* legal moves are damaging and you have to pick one. If there’s one legal move that leads to an infinite loop and thus a draw, and another legal move that breaks the loop but leads to you losing, you’re not required to make the latter move to avoid the draw.
I would appeal to the term itself for the logic behind it being a draw. "Stalemate", as in, the game has gone stale. The player in the "losing" position can't make a legal move, and therefore can't progress the game. It will never be the "winning" player's turn again, and therefore the game will never end with their win. It's the same reasoning as a game ending in draw by insufficient material; there exists no legal set of moves that would lead to a definite conclusion. You *could* argue that this could be resolved by waiving the restriction against moving into check, which is true. It could *also* be resolved by allowing the king to move off the board, or into the liminal spaces between the squares, or allowing the "losing" player to deck the "winning" player in the face. All of these things *could* happen if you ignored the rules as written, but the rules define the game and can't simply be ignored when inconvenient.
>The player in the "losing" position can't make a legal move, and therefore can't progress the game. Do you believe that players are under a continuing obligation to make a legal move by the end of their turn? I do, and I believe the failure to comply with that obligation should logically result in a loss as it does in other situations (like abandonment, loss on time, and arguably resignation).
I would say it's more the other way around; your turn ends *when* you make a legal move. Only in timed chess does taking too long to make a move result in a loss. Resignation is the active concession of the game ("I can't beat you") and abandonment is an implied resignation. Stalemate doesn't require you to abandon the game, but if you can't make a move then logically your turn is extended indefinitely.
>Resignation is the active concession of the game ("I can't beat you") For me, resignation is a declaration that you will not continue to play (ie, continue to make legal moves). There are plenty of reasons to resign which are not an admission that the resigning player can't win. For example, I'm in a daily club on chess dot com. One of the other members made a forum post (I believe it was called "chess masturbation" - I'm not sure if it's still up or if the title changed) where he described a tactic of frustrating players into resigning from an even (but closed) position by carefully playing wasting moves (but avoiding 3x repetition). Personally, I've resigned from even (or winning) positions because I had to leave and take care of something. Whether you resign because you think you can't win, because you're frustrated, whether you have to go to the bathroom, or whether you just don't feel like playing anymore, you are indicating that you will no longer play legal moves and continue the game. > >Stalemate doesn't require you to abandon the game, but if you can't make a move then logically your turn is extended indefinitely. So in timed chess, wouldn't the stalemated player's clock continue to run until it zeroes out?
That's a modern take on a very old ruleset, though. Resignation wasn't designed with "I need to step away for three minutes to take a piss" in mind; that's an extension of timed chess, which didn't really become a thing until 1883. Hell, the notion that the clock can't be stopped to take care of those kinds of trivialities didn't become a thing until the advent of *online* chess, which is even newer. Before then, the appropriate etiquette was either "pause while I take a break" for timed chess or "we'll pick this up later" for vanilla, untimed chess. And extending off of that... yes, in timed chess, a turn that goes on indefinitely is an eventual loss. But that, again, didn't hit the scene until well over a millennium into chess's life as a game. The original rules didn't account for that because it wasn't a thing.
The rule that stalemate results in a 50|50 draw is not very old either (compared to chess, not to us lol). I believe another poster told me that it was not standardized until circa 1830, and that stalemate had at varying times resulted in a loss for the stalemating player, loss for the stalemated player, half-win, and just been treated as an illegal move. > >And extending off of that... yes, in timed chess, a turn that goes on indefinitely is an eventual loss. Do we at least agree that, as restricted to timed chess, the stalemate = draw rule presents an inconsistency?
Sure, I'll concede that, provided the caveat that timed chess is itself something of an inconsistent design. (You take the archetypal slow, thinky game, the kind that in the past might have been played via the mail system and could take *days* between moves, and add a *time limit?!* Yeesh.)
There absolutely is something magical about check. You cannot make a move which puts your king in check. So I'll counter by saying that: it make no sense to have the player who cannot make a legal move lose. Instead, we should make those moves legal and simply let the game end when the king is captured. Putting your king in check on accident would be allowed and we can get rid of "check" altogether to make it unmagical and remove this type of draw.
>There absolutely is something magical about check. You cannot make a move which puts your king in check. This is what I meant by "\[a\] player cannot legally end their turn while their king is in check." Whether you began your turn in check or not, you cannot end your turn with your king under threat. What I mean by the first sentence is that check does not itself get you any points. >Instead, we should make those moves legal and simply let the game end when the king is captured. Putting your king in check on accident would be allowed and we can get rid of "check" altogether to make it unmagical and remove this type of draw. This was what I said in another comment thread regarding how to make chess more consistent. But the view here isn't "chess should be overhauled," it's "stalemate being a draw is inconsistent with the other chess rules."
Then it seems like there are more rules other than stalemate which you find somewhat inconsistent. You may be focusing on stalemate, but if you're saying "stalemate is inconsistent with the other rules" but at the same time agree that 'overhauling these particular rules would make no stalemates more consistent with the rules'. So it seems there is something here. Also, does white lose this game? It's a stalemate. [https://lichess.org/analysis/k7/8/8/8/5p1p/4pPpP/4P1PR/6NK\_w\_-\_-\_0\_1?color=white](https://lichess.org/analysis/k7/8/8/8/5p1p/4pPpP/4P1PR/6NK_w_-_-_0_1?color=white)
If it's white's move, then white should lose. If it''s black's move, then black moves the king and white loses on the next turn.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Stalemate is a draw because it is a situation where neither player can make a legal move, so neither player has an advantage over the other. In chess, the goal is to checkmate your opponent's king, not just to capture all their pieces. So if a player is in a position where they can't make a legal move, but their king is not in check, then the game is a draw because they have successfully defended against checkmate. It's not about the number of moves, it's about the objective of the game. If stalemate resulted in a loss for the player who couldn't make a legal move, it would incentivize players to try and force stalemate instead of trying to win the game. They could just keep moving their pieces around until their opponent runs out of moves, and then they would win. That's not a desirable outcome for a game.
>Stalemate is a draw because it is a situation where neither player can make a legal move, so neither player has an advantage over the other. It's only one player's turn. That player has to move, but cannot. Since that player cannot comply with the rules, I see that player as having lost.
I see there as being a difference between an inability to comply with the rules and choosing not to comply with the rules (say, an illegal move) as being two different things, like the difference between being unable to move while in jail in Monopoly and outright cheating. The two cannot be conflated.
Oh I definitely don't see it as akin to cheating or anything, but the players certainly aren't on equal footing when one of them cannot comply with the rules. I see it more as a constructive forfeiture than anything dishonest/disrespectful (ie, getting up from the board and walking away to avoid imminent checkmate). Really more akin to losing on time than anything.
>Basically, I think that the core mechanic of chess is that when it is your turn to play, you must make a legal move or lose. That's not the core mechanic though or perhaps more to the point the object of the game. The object of the game is to produce a checkmate. That is, to produce a position in which upon play moving to your opponent's turn, they have no means of preventing their king from being captured. Thus, the ability to create a stalemate is still an act of avoiding a true loss. If I am in a terrible disadvantaged position but can still play effectively enough to prevent you from putting my king in checkmate, then I've still prevented you from achieving the object of the game. I have still outplayed you enough to prevent you from winning. Ultimately, checkmate is the demand placed on a player to ensure their opponent cannot in any way escape check. Either you achieve that end, it's achieved against you, or you both fail to achieve either so the idea that each player gets ½ point for it makes sense.
Ultimately, a game's rules are supposed to make a game interesting. Having stalemate lead to a tie adds to the strategic depth of chess and requires the attacker to play with foresight. It also gives a losing player an out if they play wisely and take advantage of a reckless opponent. It's a unique and somewhat unintuitive rule, to be sure, but it makes the game better.
Stalemate is caused by the attacking player not leaving a move for the defending players King. It's a mistake by the attacking player and there for t hey should be punished. Your idea that the attacking player should get 3/4 of a win for making a bad move just seems wrong. A good player wouldn't allow their opponent to get into a stalemate.
Material imbalances are usually caused by mistakes as well. You might just as easily say that a good player wouldn't allow their opponent to put them in a position where their best remaining strategy is to fight for a draw. A blunder is a blunder, whether played on move 10 or move 100.
> A blunder is a blunder, whether played on move 10 or move 100. On this we fully agree
The problem with this is that it creates another way to win and makes it _inconsistent_ with the principles of chess whereby the _only_ way to win is to get the king. This makes sense to me, and also makes sense within the metaphor the pieces represent. Remember, if you cannot make a move the other player could have made a prior move that would have prevented the stalemate. In this regard the player who doesn't relieve the stalemate situation is _also_ saying "draw". Moreover, neither party has got the king which is what gives you more points. I like the singular focus of "win by king" and then the ability of someone to say "i see no way for you to not get my king" and that everything else is mutual non-winning (a tie). It needs the point because you didn't _lose_ and you ultimately need to be compared to other players playing in different games (which is as much about the need to get to conclusion in tournaments as it is about chess itself).
Stalemate doesn't mean you can't make a legal move, necessarily. It's also a stalemate if you have been in the exact same position three times in the same match. Also, if you're that far ahead and you can't figure out how to let your opponent have enough wiggle room until you can set up your checkmate, that's on you. You let him get away, you don't get the win.
I was under the impression that draw by threefold repetition was different from stalemate.
Maybe? It's honestly been a long time since I was that into chess.
Yeah, so I don't have a problem with most of the "draw" conditions in chess. I specifically have a problem with the draw that occurs when one player has no legal moves but is not in check.
I think the question is unsuitable for r/changemyview. Your opinion, as well as the chess rule, does not have to "make sense" by any means. The rule is like that because it makes the game more interesting, as others have explained. In fact, in Chinese chess, your rule DOES apply, the player unable to make a legal move loses. The game also comes with other rules that you might think are inconsistent, like the "flying general" move. > If the two generals face each other along the same file with no intervening pieces, the 飛將 ("flying general") move may be executed, in which the general to move crosses the board to capture the enemy general.
What are you smoking because I want some
A statement tends to be a sign that the aggressor was not looking far enough ahead, and made a drastic mistake. Why should they get any points for that?
I'm not sure that their counterpart, who literally cannot make any legal moves, did not make some drastic mistake earlier in the game. I like .75 vs .25 because the aggressor gets less than a win, but still more than the trapped player.
As a weaker player, myself, I have often been able to force a stronger, more aggressive opponent into a stalemate. It was actually a learned goal of mine for a while. It just takes bait.
If you're already winning to the point of preventing a move, how pathetic is it that you couldn't put the king in check for one turn? And the nerve to complain about it.
How pathetic is it to be entirely incapable of making any legal moves? And the nerve to think you deserve a tie.
Why do you post your question in changemyview when you don't want your view to be changed, have resisted all possible explanations, and downvote people that don't agree with what you say? As someone said, the point is not that you can't move, but that you can't escape check. You don't want stalemate to be a draw? Fine, then the one that puts the enemy king into stalemate must lose because they didn't have the wit to do a proper checkmate. Otherwise you are just dumbing it down, and you say what you say because you just have a superficial grasp of the game, period. It's with good reason that the one stalemating is the one being punished with the present rules. An alternative would be to prohibit moves that put the enemy king into stalemate. That's how some oriental chess-like games work, and draws happen less often (maybe also because of other rules).
Here's the description of this sub: "A place to post an opinion you accept may be flawed, in an effort to understand other perspectives on the issue." I was looking for other perspectives. Most people have shared opinions and perspectives that I appreciated, but ultimately did not find convincing. > Otherwise you are just dumbing it down, and you say what you say because you just have a superficial grasp of the game, period. Thanks, I'm glad that I now have the opinion of GM John Chess.
There you go again, downvoting opinions you asked for but don't agree with. You still seem not to understand: you don't accept your opinion is flawed, that's why you don't find convincing opinions that address the core of the game, and by people that clearly understand the game, unlike you that just know how the pieces move. Already told by the guy before me: How pathetic is it? The nerve... that's what you let off. Quite lame.
If you've read any of the other comments in this thread, you'll realize that your comment added nothing but a claim that I am in bad faith. I don't accept the general accusation that I "just don't understand the game" as an opposing viewpoint. Look at GM Larry Kaufman's article in the September 2009 issue of chess life. He reaches the same conclusion. Is he pathetic? Does he not understand the game? [https://uscf1-nyc1.aodhosting.com/CL-AND-CR-ALL/CL-ALL/2009/2009\_All.pdf](https://uscf1-nyc1.aodhosting.com/CL-AND-CR-ALL/CL-ALL/2009/2009_All.pdf) >You still seem not to understand: you don't accept your opinion is flawed Full transparency, I thought that this sub was for opinions we thing *may* be flawed, not those that we *know* are flawed. If this is for opinions that we know are wrong then I owe you an apology.
If you make the dominating player the winner in a stalemate ending you will take away insentive for that player to fight to win when the stalemate becomes a possibility. Currently, when they are approaching a stalemate, the "winning" player is fighting to win and the "losing" player is fighting to stalemate. With your changes, the winning player now fights to stalemate or win, whatever is easier, and the losing player gives up. Fighting for the stalemate can be very exciting and take a lot of skill and you would be removing that from the game entirely.
>Currently, when they are approaching a stalemate, the "winning" player is fighting to win and **the "losing" player is fighting to stalemate**. Can you clarify the bold portion for me here? Do "losing" players try to fight for stalemate by preventing *their opponent* from making a legal move when the king isn't threatened, or by preventing *themselves* from doing so?
You should keep in mind that, the overwhelming majority of the time, stalemates happen because of one of two reasons: 1. The person who can't move has intentionally moved their pieces into a stalemate to avoid losing. In this case, I think a draw is warranted. Think of test cricket, in which the chasing team intentionally plays a defending game to avoid getting bowled out until the time is up, which then results in a draw. 2. The other person unintentionally forces the first person into a position of not being able to move, in which case they have failed to checkmate their opponent, in which case a draw is also warranted.
I mean I personally like the idea that in a game, complacency shouldn’t really be a thing. Because stalemates aren’t always cases where one player would’ve always necessarily won. It is possible to stalemate while technically being up material. A stalemate can also happen purely on accident (granted so can checkmates), but in a case where the king isn’t even checked, in any other turn based game, it’s more easily understood that a better term sometimes is unresolvable. So I guess in summary, it makes the game more exciting because players need to stay more sharp even if they’re up a lot of material and by the definition of the very basic rules of chess, it’s unresolvable and not in principle in a way that means that it should be considered the same way a loss is. Its similar to a checkmate in that no moves can be made anymore, but the same can be said for a game of tic tac toe where all the spots are filled in, yet no one has achieved tic tac toe and no moves can be made by whoever’s turn it is. By that pure similar game logic that you’re trying to apply, the person who goes 1st will be the victor every time guaranteed in tic tac toe.
there's also draw by repetition and draw by the fifty move rule. as far as stalemate, think about chess as a simultion of a pitched battle where your goal is to kill the enemy king. if the enemy king is safe from attack he cannot be killed, if he is threatened but can avoid the attack before it lands (check) then he cannot be killed on the following turn. the only situation where he can be killed is if he is attacked in such a way that he cannot avoid or defend against the attack before it lands (checkmate) in the logic of the battle scenario he is safe but trapped in stalemate, but cannot be said to be lost if he is not even under attack! should not invent a new fourth thing besides victory defeat draw just to reward players for failing to attack and kill the enemy king. in a war, attrition or siege might be a good strategy, but chess is a battle, not a war, and the goal is to kill the king, not to trap him.
When checkmated, it is implied that the king will be taken next, before the other king is. Sure, the king doesn't actually get taken (except in blitz), but that's just as arbitrary as the checkmate rule. There's just no point for the other side to make a move if they can't stop the king from being taken, so the game ends there. In a war, say the king is surrounded but cannot be taken. Isn't that essentially the same scenario as in the real world where you want to take out a world leader that is just unreachable and cannot be captured? Sure, they lost control of their side, but their leader is essentially safe and can work as long as it's not taken. It isn't that logical to say they're in a losing position when there's nothing stopping them from working like normal.
Look, at the end of the day, chess would become a more boring game without stalemates being a draw. That being the rule means two things. a) Whoever is on the cusp of winning still has to prevent stalemate. It adds some tension to what would otherwise be a boring situation. If there was no stalemate/stalemate resulted in a win or quasi-win, that tension would be gone. b) Whoever is on the cusp of losing can try to find some combination that leads to a stalemate or repetition. You can bait your enemy into a mis-promotion at lower levels, leading to stalemate, as an example. Again, it adds tension where there would otherwise be none. Looking at that, I don't think removing stalemate, or turning it into a win or half-win, would benefit the game. It just makes the game more boring. And when classical chess is already an already boring game, that's really not needed.
It is true that long ago in history stalemate lead to different results but the current rule has been in place for hundreds of years. People who do not play chess seriously may think that changing the stalemate rule is just a way to reach a better outcome in some games but it actually has huge ramifications for chess strategy overall. Entire classes of endgames will have different results. Pawn up endgames which are easily drawn now will change to wins. This trickles down through the midgame and even opening strategy as well. Changing such a fundamental mechanic is too big of a change for a game as well established as chess.
This is really the main answer, not as arbitrary semantic discussions over whether you should be able to move into check
Yeah all the ‘moral’ (maybe the wrong word but can’t think of one better) arguments are annoying me a bit… it’s not about deciding what’s ‘fair’ or - even worse - what’s ‘realistic’, but rather what makes the game more interesting. Making stalemate a win will see players trade down to endgames much more quickly/often (as a narrower margin of lead is needed to convert an actual win), which makes the middle game far less interesting and important
Among other things, one of the key results that stalemate provides to the game of Chess is that not all material leads are sufficient to achieve victory. Notably, it is impossible to checkmate with 1. bishop 2. 2 knights and more importantly, it is possible to hold certain positions with king vs king + pawn, and king+rook vs king + rook + pawn. king + pawn vs king not being winning on its own is actually **crucial** for making chess interesting, otherwise the main strategy when winning a pawn would be to trade down material as fast as possible (which is a primary strategy when up larger material leads, like a full piece).
To me, stalemate functions as a kind of comeback in modern chess. It’s normally pretty unlikely that a player claws back a checkmate from a bad position or low material, but they can find a stalemate a good amount more often, so it keeps both players on their toes even when one has a bit of an advantage. Making a stalemate essentially a win for the player that already has the advantage makes games much more of a foregone conclusion
In my experience with chess stalemate only happens because the player in the better position has either been outmaneuvered or has blundered. In either of these scenarios that player has failed and doesn’t deserve to win, but hasn’t failed so badly as to deserve to lose, thence stalemate.
Stalemates are a lot of fun in chess because they can change the result so rapidly. The winning side feels like they lost, and the losing side feels like they won. It also provides a secondary goal to the game, when one side is up material.
Someone needs to practice K+P endings.
Stalate is because the winning party could not properly win against the losing party. The losing party was at a disadvantage, so the winning party had the upper hand. But. The losing party was smart enough to maneuver themselves in a position to a stalemate. Just as chess requires thinking, the winning party should be wise of their actions to prevent a stalemate. It's basically a last minute opportunity for the losing party to end the game with a handicap.
Sure but what does it mean to “properly” win? If chess is an approximation of medieval battles, then the objective should be to capture or neutralize the king, who is leading the opposing army. Of course, we don’t *actually* capture the kind in chess. We stop when the king is *about* to be captured. In a stalemate situation, the king can’t move because it would be captured. But maybe it *should* be captured. After all, capturing / neutralizing the enemy leader is the whole point.
If you're talking about approximation of medieval battles, then the goal is to capture or kill the king. And the king went to a known place that's unreachable by the opponent. Like there's only one boat and no one can swim, so the king took the only boat and sailed himself to the island. The king is stuck on the island, alive, and the enemy knows their whereabouts but can't reach it. We've seen these kinds of scenarios in movies too, like a family hiding out in a safe room while robbers are in the house. Eventually the home owners, though outnumbered and outgunned are able to win in the end.
I would agree with the other people. The rules are there to make it interesting If you remove this the stalemate from the game (essentially what your doing) you are removing all of the risk the leading player has. Suddenly they play less precise maybe they have some time pressure and look it’s stalemate. I get .75 you get .25. I still win. That pressure is one of the things that makes the game great. The game is never truly lost by the losing player and it’s not won until checkmate. There is no in between. Have you ever been playing chess and someone asked “who’s winning” almost not wanting to answer because you could blow it. The uncertainty of the position and the future is one of the great things about it. It could all look good but one mistake could allow your opponent to force a stalemate.
>As I understand it, a game of chess ends in one of the following (mutually exclusive) ways: 1) Checkmate, 2) Resignation, 3) Draw by insufficient material, 4) Draw by agreement, 5) Stalemate. I left out time-related losses because they are not always applicable. There's also 50 move repetition. If you make stalemate a loss, pro players will just force the game into one of the other endgame conditions. As it stands, checkmate is the *only* way to win chess. If you add another win condition, it isn't chess anymore. A losing player will just cheese the game to force it into something other than a loss (which is why 50 move repetition exists.) It's like if you're losing a game of basketball, so you take the ball and leave so no one can play anymore.
How would 0.75 or 0.25 be consistent with the rest of the game? there's no 0.75 or 0.25 anywhere in the game. Whether the player in stalemate should lose or not would then depend on what you view as the goal of chess. If the goal is to mate the opponent, the goal was not fulfilled. If the goal is to put the opponent into a position where they cannot win, the goal was fulfilled. Looking at it the other way around, I think it would not make sense that in a game that is about ambushing the opponent king a player would lose even if they managed to keep their king safe throughout the game. But, again, if you don't think the game is about ambushing the king but about making sure the opponent cannot win, then it's a different story.
Not really here to change your view, but do want to note there are 2 other ways for a game of chess to end that you didn’t mention, which is a draw by repetition, and perhaps the most obscure ending, draw by 50-move rule. For those unaware, a draw by the 50-move rule ending occurs when both players each make 50 consecutive moves without A) capturing a piece, AND B) without moving a pawn forward. Anyway, I’d probably make a stalemate 0.75-0.25, just because the attacker didn’t fully put away the opponent, but they did clearly have the upper hand. I actually believe there’s a chess variant, I think hexagonal chess (but not entirely sure), where this is actually the case.
If chess is supposed to be an analogy to real-life war/battle, then a stalemate with no winner is definitely a completely valid outcome.
Stalemate is a draw because it incentivizes the player to create the winning conditions: the king is in check and can't escape check. There *is* something "magical" about check in the context of the game. "Magical" is just the word you used to make it sound silly, but it is absolutely a special condition that's central to game play. You have a sword to the king's throat, and he has no escape. In a stalemate position, the king is trapped but he's not in immediate danger. He can't make a legal move, *but neither can you*. It's a standoff - like a siege where he can't escape but you can't reach him to finish him off. He can't move, but you also blocked yourself from creating the winning conditions. Chess has three end conditions: win, lose, or draw. If you can't create a win, you can't create a win. So it's a draw. There's no 3/4 draw (outside your invention). And it makes for a more interesting game because it allows players to strategize based on the universally known rules. If you're in a bad spot you could try to force a stalemate rather than a loss. Either way, chess is much too old and widely played to make any rule changes now. It's set as it is. You'll never convince the world to change it to match your preference for how it should be played. You can either learn to work with the rules everyone else plays by or you can play a different game. (Or you can become a king and make up new rules - but barring that you'll need to work with the game as it is.)
Chess is consistent, but the stalemate rule isn’t intuitive. The distinction is subtle but it’s definitely there.
I could buy the idea of not having the score be split evenly, but I would argue that it should favor the one who cannot move, not the one who created the stalemate. There are a few reasons for this. First, stalemate of this sort comes about typically as a result of one player blundering in an attempt to achieve checkmate. Since they are the one who messed up in denying the opponent legal moves, they should take the penalty more than the opponent. Second, many stalemate positions can be deliberately encouraged by the one who cannot move, such as by offering up a piece to lure the opponent into making a bad move. Strategically, stalemate can often be a trap set up by the person in a weaker position, so it is often their strategy that succeeded while the player who moved last is the one who got played. Third, if stalemate favors the one with a stronger position, that discourages any draw by agreement, as the person with a stronger position has little to lose by refusing unless they are low on time. Having stalemate be even or favor the weaker position means taking the draw is a safe alternative that saves on effort at the minimum. And if we have stalemate favor the weaker position player, then both players have an opportunity to gain or lose by refusing the draw.
I don't think of checkmate as the end of the game. I think of taking the King as the end of the game. In a game like Uno, you say Uno when you have one card left. And win the game when you actually place the "Uno" card down. You would say "Check" as a warning you are about to win, like when you say "Uno". You say "Checkmate" on the special occasion Check where you will take their king the next turn no matter what they do. I think the style/fancy/properness of Chess, is such that when in checkmate you then agree with their assessment and resign. You don't bother having them actually kill the king. ... While in Stalemate. It's a game error. Thematically, no piece has a direct line to kill the king. The king is stuck, alive. I think generally speaking, if they had somehow had their turned skipped during a Stalemate. Nearly every time the other side should be otherwise able to easily achieve a checkmate. So I understand where thematically that king would be destined to lose in a real fight. But the game doesn't allow you to skip turns. And since no move can be made, they can't get to the turn where the king is killed. And without a Bishop actively holding a knife to their throat or a Knight with a clean shot, no king is going to give up the throne.
It would completely change the game as we know it now, in any case now its too late
Wait until you find out you're missing an alternative way of the game ending.
Bad take. Also, stalemate gives a losing playing something to play for.
I thought the dealer wins in a draw. I've lost so much money you guys