There is a new proposal for chess:
-
Slight Win: A player wins slightly if any of the following
conditions hold:
d. The opponent offers to concede a slight win and he or she agrees,
e. He or she stalemates his or her opponent.
f. Without making a move, a player calls the arbiter and proves that as
a result of her opponent's last move, the same position has occurred thrice.
The player that wins slightly gets 4/6 points, and the player that loses slightly
get 2/6 points.
Why not go further and allow the players to bargain for a split sum of any magnitude? "I offer you .5713 to stop playing now…"
What’s wrong with 2/3 and 1/3?
Just make stalemate a win (loss) not a draw. The game would be radically changed.
Really? My brother and I made this up and he was able to beat me more frequently than usual. I’ve never heard of it before.
this sounds like a problem of points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_points
It’s an interesting idea. I think it actually hurts on the spectator/sponsorship side, though, as games that would previously be agreed draws turn into an extra 2 hours of endgame jockeying for an extra 1/6 of a point (Re: Andy, it’s easiest to keep everything in the least common denominator if we’re allowing 1/3 and 1/2 points.) Also, while grandmasters will be more likely to make “mistakes”, a mistake that turns a draw into a slight loss is going to be very hard for the amateur spectator to see.
The fundamental effect that changes the game is noted in the article, that now K+P vs. K is at worst a slight win for the K+P, making endgames a lot more perilous for the defending side. I’m not sure whether I like the idea of 3 position repetition becoming a slight loss for the side that forces the repetition.
Why not just go all the way and use a double-or-resign system like Backgammon?
Great. Having screwed up finance and economics beyond rescue, you guys now want to screw up chess too.
Maybe chess needs to borrow the possibility of bluffing from poker.
How about this: when a pawn reaches the last rank, the player cannot choose the piece it is promoted to; rather, this should be pre-selected at random before the game and known only to the player himself, not his opponent. The pawn might become a queen, a rook, a bishop, a knight, or it might simply vanish.
Or perhaps one randomly pre-selected non-king piece for each player is designated as a “land mine”… any piece attempting to capture it will instead itself be removed from the board. The identity of the player’s land-mine piece will be known only to him or her, not the opponent. Yeah, I left my queen open to capture, so? Do you feel lucky, punk?
Changing the rules of games is an epic fail in and of itself.
I read somewhere that chess becomes simpler to analyze (in expectation) if players toss a coin to decide who moves next.
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