Re: Chess evolves...

On Oct 16, 11:46 pm, "M Winther" <m...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Working with chess is like trying to press juice out of a wizened
orange. The only sane attitude is to relate to chess as a woodchopper.
Study standard theory so you get a sound position, and sit down at the
board and practice calculation. Don't try to be creative, you get too
little out of any effort. Concentrate, instead, on capitalizing on the
opponents' mistakes. Make mediocre moves at a good tempo. The
latter sentence was Spassky's recommendation, when he finally had
lost his faith in the creative properties of chess.

Since the chess variants usually proposed don't take the game in the
direction of Chinese Chess, they at best tend to make the game shorter
by adding powerful pieces (the way Capablanca Chess did) without
fundamentally changing the fact that Steinitz' way to play chess is
the winning way.

If changing the pieces and the board won't be accepted, and is likely
not to address the issue, at least unless one goes all the way to
Chinese Chess, then what?

This is why I had my Dynamic Scoring idea. In Go, a phase where
careful defensive play led to the first player always winning was
surmounted by giving the second player a handicap, called _komidashi_.
This forced the first player to take risks in order to win, opening up
the position, leading to exciting battles between the two players.

The handicap included an odd 1/2 stone, so that draws could only take
place by agreement.

Chess games aren't scored on points - you win, lose, or draw; there
are only points for matches and tournaments composed of many games -
so it wasn't immediately clear how this could be adapted to Chess. And
I don't know an exact value for White's first move advantage in Chess
in a form I could apply to a handicap of some kind.

A rule that White couldn't make a pawn-two move as his first move
wouldn't achieve the desired result; we know *that* because there are
sound openings for White that don't involve a pawn-two on move one; it
would just restrict the commonly used openings to no good purpose.

So I came up with a scheme to keep the chessboard and moves the same,
but motivate more energetic play by both sides. Let stalemate, bare
king, and *even* perpetual check count as _partial_ wins. Keep 1 point
for a win, and 1/2 - 1/2 for a draw, but give black greater partial
credit than white for a partial win - especially the smallest partial
wins.

So black is highly motivated to try for at least a little win, and
white is highly motivated to move the game in the direction of a more
decisive result. White can play defensively enough to deny black the
opportunity of checkmate, but it will be pretty hard to play a game
without black at least getting an opportunity to inflict perpetual
check.

The pieces, the board, and the moves don't change, but what you have
to *do* with them changes.

John Savard
.

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