It always seemed to me that if you put your opponent in a position with no more legal moves, then you’ve WON. Geez, which sore loser came up with this rule?
grumble grumble
This came up in a recent chess thread… no good answer that I can recall, except possibly… “the goal of chess is to carry through a successful attack on your opponent’s king that he/she cannot avoid, block, or counter. If you haven’t done that, then you haven’t won.”
Arguably, it makes chess play more interesting and exciting. There may be a lot of situations where you have the advantage, and could either go for a relatively easy stalemate, or a somewhat more challenging checkmate sequence (which might have a flaw that you haven’t seen.) Making the stalemate a threat to be avoided by whichever player has the upper hand… I can see how that kinduv ups the stakes.
Personally, I still love the idea of my scheme, where a stalemate is neither a win, nor automatically a draw. If you stalemate the other guy and he has no legal moves, you can choose whether to force a draw, or to move again yourself.
Then you’d really be surprised to find out that the person who was stalemated actually WON the game under English rules from the 17th- early19th Century. 
But the laws say not. Geez, which sore non-winner first whined about this? It’d change the nature of the game considerably if it was revoked, because for a start, king and one pawn versus bare king would always be a win for the stronger side, which would mean any player with a one pawn advantage would always adopt the trade-down strategy without any thought for the ending that would follow. And there are some other positions where the existence of stalemate as a factor makes the game a lot more interesting, too.
chrisk’s suggestion makes King and two Knights versus bare King a win for the stronger side… not that this is horribly unbalancing given the rarity of the ending.
By comparison, the parent game shatranj included a win by baring the opponent’s King (i.e. taking all his other pieces), but this was downgraded to a draw (or a “Medinese Victory”, a lesser grade of win) if the response to taking his last man was to have your own taken in reply.
It is strange to me that chess isn’t simply played out until one or other king is taken. This would stop the need for rules that a King cannot be moved into check, and also make stalemates almost impossible.
Huh?
Moving your King into check is the same thing as forfeiting the game. Next move you lose…may as well resign as it amounts to the same thing.
It is quite possible for unwinnable situations to arise. The easiest to think of is just having only the two Kings left on the board (there are other combinations of pieces that cannot force a win). There is no way to win. If there was no rule for stalemates (i.e. someone has to win) then it becomes a game of who can outlast the other person’s boredom before throwing in the towel.
Well, obviously there would be other draw conditions that would still relate. King versus king alone can never be a proper stalemate either, because it’s impossible for one king to trap the other king so that he has no legal moves. It would go to the 50-move draw condition, or whatever, if it isn’t declared an automatic draw on principle.
Now, going back to bippy’s idea, aside from inadvertently letting your king get taken, what real differences to the game would there be in making his change? One that I can think of right away is castling through check… under current rules this is illegal ‘de jure’, but under ‘bippy laws’ the king is not actually in danger, because it does not rest under attack once the castling move is complete. Is it also illegal to ‘castle away from check’?? If so, that’d be another minor change, presumably that would be legal under bippy rules.
I like to think about it in “real world” terms.
Imagine you’re actually trying to kill a person. You need to be able to attack him, and not let that person have any safe place to move to. You win.
Now, if you give him no safe place to move to, but you can’t attack him, why would that person choose to move?
Of course, in that framework (the king has the option not to move into an attacked position), shouldn’t a player be able to “pass” on his turn at any time during the game? That would be unfortunate, though, and remove the concept of zugzwang
Yep. And to continue that thought slightly…
- You need to be somewhere that the guy you’re trying to kill, or his friends, can’t kill you first.
- You need it to be the case that none of the guy’s friends can ‘dive in front of the bullet’ or otherwise move to block you from your target.
- Hi, Opal!
Yes, I’m a chess nitpicker.
Discussed recently in this thread.
Sam, can you get me a cite on that? I am frequently stalemated by a friend who is clearly a superior player, and I would love to show it to him.
hmmm, hadn’t thought of castling through check as being illegal due to the no putting king in check rule. I was mostly considering the stalemates where the king has no legal moves due to only available places being to put it into check. With the simplification I was suggesting, then these would be a loss to the ‘stalemated’ side as they would simply be forced to move the King into check, following which point it would be taken by the winning side.
Casteling into and through check would be part of the special rules about casteling (of which there are quite a few) and so in my opinion it would still be illegal to castle through or out of check, since I don’t want to change anything about the game except where relivent to stalemates.
So King vs King alone would always be stalemate (unless one side tries to lose) by the 50 move rule. King and porn would beat king alone if king can protect pawn. Not sure about king and knight vs king or king and 2 knights vs king.
But it’s annoyingly easy to get yourself into situations where you clearly HAVE won (opponent can’t move, and if he passed the next turn you could kill him if the game didn’t end THIS VERY TURN). Grr. I fail to see how it adds strategy. You could impose any number of arbitrary rules on the game to “add strategy”. You could make it illegal to capture an opponent’s piece if that would result in their number of remaining pieces becoming a prime number, if you yourself have a prime number of remaining pieces. That would “add strategy” too.
Is it possible to construct a stalemate that doesn’t rely on check rules?? You have to have a king, probably surround him in one of the far corners, and hem him in with two pawns on their seventh rank. That gets us almost there, but completing the stalemate from here is going to be tricky.
We’ll need something to keep the second of those pawns from moving forward and queening, and also to keep the king from moving sideways. An enemy piece would keep the pawn from moving, but the king would be able to attack it, even if it’s protected, without check rules. So it has to be a friendly, and not a friendly pawn, because pawns can never exist on the eighth rank. Dangit.
If we’re not limited to pieces that could result from a usual game, you could put in a row of pawns all along the seventh rank, and eight non-knight pieces in the eighth rank. (say, add in two extra queens.) But those queens couldn’t come from anything except pawns…
I admit, I’m drawing a blank here. Anyone else want to give it a go??
It adds strategy because a person in a losing position may try to play for the draw rather than losing. Of course the other person, thinking they have a chance to win, has to try and stop that tactic. Certainly you could add any number of rules that would make such a thing more easy to do or more difficult. I have played chess where alternate rules have been applied. Still, the current set of chess rules are the most played because they seem to do the best job of maintaining a fun, interesting and pretty much always different game everytime played.
:dubious:
From the OED:
Stalemate is a draw because you haven’t completed the conditions for winning the game.
A game of chess is won when the king is placed in check and cannot move to a square where he cannot be taken on the next turn. If you cannot take the opponent’s king, you haven’t won the game.
Does this create a sort of artificial condition whereby the person clearly winning the game has his just desserts taken away? Yes, but so does the repeated position rule (a draw is declared when the position on the board has existed twice previously, the same person having the move). The rule exists to get the players out of situations where the “best” effort of one player results in forced repetition ad infinitum, but it isn’t always limited to those situations.
The way to avoid losing a sure win through stalemate is to play CAREFULLY when you have the advantage. Rarely is a stalemate the forced result of play when one has the advantage. :dubious:
Ditto above. Personally, I think stalemates are great. Even though I’ve been carelessly led into them more times than I care to admit, it helps keep the offensive player on their toes and allows the defense opportunities to exploit the complacency that often arises from a significant material advantage. Stalements shouldn’t be much of a bother to a patient, careful, experienced player. It’s people like me, who play impulsively and get a little too comfortable with material leads, that get screwed in the end. And this is good. It makes you bear down and concentrate and adds that extra element of strategy and thought into the game.
I was actually hoping for something I could link to in an e-mail. I’ll turn something up, though.