Agreed. It’d be nice if the chess folk took some low-hanging-fruit rule changes seriously.
Treating stalemate as a loss is the most obvious. I’d be interested to know how much this would change things at the highest level. Ah—I see DM tried this (gwern’s link), with disappointingly little impact.
A more ‘drastic’ (but IMO interesting) endgame change would be to change the goal of chess from “capture the king” to “get the king to the opponent’s throne” (i.e. white wins by getting the king to e8, black wins by getting the king to e1; checkmate/stalemate wins immediately).
You get some moderately interesting endgames with this rule—e.g. king+bishop can win against king from most positions, as can king+knight. This means that many liquidate-material-to-drawn-endgame tactics no longer work.
For more general endgame positions, the e8 and e1 squares become an extra weakness. So positions where it was hard/impossible to convert an advantage (difficult with only one weakness to exploit), become winnable (two weaknesses often being enough).
I don’t know how it’d work out in practice. It’d be fun to see how [this + chess960] worked out at high level.
Agreed. It’d be nice if the chess folk took some low-hanging-fruit rule changes seriously.
Treating stalemate as a loss is the most obvious.
I’d be interested to know how much this would change things at the highest level.Ah—I see DM tried this (gwern’s link), with disappointingly little impact.A more ‘drastic’ (but IMO interesting) endgame change would be to change the goal of chess from “capture the king” to “get the king to the opponent’s throne” (i.e. white wins by getting the king to e8, black wins by getting the king to e1; checkmate/stalemate wins immediately).
You get some moderately interesting endgames with this rule—e.g. king+bishop can win against king from most positions, as can king+knight.
This means that many liquidate-material-to-drawn-endgame tactics no longer work.
For more general endgame positions, the e8 and e1 squares become an extra weakness. So positions where it was hard/impossible to convert an advantage (difficult with only one weakness to exploit), become winnable (two weaknesses often being enough).
I don’t know how it’d work out in practice.
It’d be fun to see how [this + chess960] worked out at high level.