> Some players, including world champions such as José Raúl Capablanca, Emanuel Lasker, and Bobby Fischer, have expressed fears of a "draw death" as chess becomes more deeply analyzed.
> To alleviate this danger, Capablanca and Fischer both proposed chess variants to revitalize the game, while Lasker suggested changing how draws and stalemate are scored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_ches...
The result was controversial (the championship match would be restarted), and the other alternative formats that have been used are also controversial. Such as the reigning champion retaining the championship if a decisive result isn’t produced, and the current format where they play classical games, then rapid games if it’s tied, then blitz games if it’s still tied, then an “armageddon” game if it’s still tied. The most recent championship match was decided by rapid games, which a lot of people basically considered to be a non-result.
Would also love different overtime ideas played out in soccer, e.g. put players out of the game. When it's 8 vs 8 maybe that leads to more goals in overtime or something... also, there was a time/place where penalties were shot differently (with running with the ball like in hockey), so there exist opportunities to change but as far as I see it there's an unwillingness.
This is simply the nature of games where you need a decisive advantage to turn a draw into a victory. In high level chess you need a decisive material advantage to win, and in soccer, a game where both teams scoring 0 points isn’t uncommon, you also need a somewhat decisive advantage to win.
But these are also both games that are very simple and well balanced. I think they’re better without additional complications, and the best solution is simply to extend play. In the 1984 chess championship I mentioned, the match was abandoned by the organisers. Karpov and Kasparov were both happy to continue playing for another 5 months if that’s what was required.
I think that’s the point. You had your chance to win the game and it took too long, so now you play a shorter, modified version of the game to determine a winner.
The same criticism could be leveled at 8v8 soccer that “it’s not soccer”. Your team depth matters less and your stars matter more.
It would create injuries to “extend play”, not to mention creating boring 2 or 3 hour long 1-0 matches.
'the problem with soccer' implies that there's a fundamental problem preventing it from working rather than the reality of it being the most successful sport in the world, regardless of what fans of American sports enjoy and in spite of corrupt leadership and perverse financial incentives.
The effect is to give one side draw odds in the regular game or match. The other side, knowing that a tie means a loss for them, will have to play more aggressively for the win. This should lead to more decisive games.
What would happen if chess was reduced to purely "normal" piece moves? What happens if pawns lose their initial two square move? Obviously it would reduce the space of potential games by quite a lot but would it reduce chess to draughts/checkers?
Shall I pick my own stake to be burned at?
Those rules were added in to make faster games. Taking them out would slow the game down, and we've at least a hundred years of the new rules (faster games) being preferred.
Not exactly what you were asking, but you may be shocked to learn that Chess has had two significant patches very recently - namely clarifying the rules to prevent promoting a pawn to an enemy piece (sometimes causing a smothered mate), and to prevent castling with a pawn promoted to a rook on the 8th rank (annotated humourously as 0-0-0-0-0-0!!). These patches were seemingly implemented in the late 19th century and 1970s respectively, although it's surprisingly hard to find out precisely when.
Obscure, but also completely to do with how the pieces on the board can actually move, which I bet most people would have suspected that we worked out a few centuries ago.
The decision of who goes first doesn't really matter, it's a purely aesthetic choice. Similarly there's a lot of regulatory changes to this day around things better described as "playing conditions". But banning 0-0-0-0-0-0 is fundamentally the same category of change as saying "oh and also the queen can move like a knight now", which seems like an absolutely ridiculous thing to have still been refining in the 1970s.
There was nothing ambiguous about it. There was no possible interpretation of the rules that would have prevented those moves.
It's happened several times in MtG tournament history for example, where some mechanism was so clearly against the intended rules that the judges just didn't allow it even though it would have worked as a strict reading of the rules (nonsense about actions "between turns" and I recall Yawgs Will exiling as a triggered effect both just getting shut down by judges).
The two things you mention are solely gags for funny chess puzzles about what is an obvious oversight in some specific written rulesets, not actually something that would have actually been legal play.
I would not describe either of the chess examples as "stupid". "silly", sure, but neither of them is really any more ridiculous than en passant is.
> It's happened several times in MtG tournament history for example, where some mechanism was so clearly against the intended rules that the judges just didn't allow it
I feel like it's fair to make a distinction between a game like MtG where interactions and synergies are sufficiently complex enough to make those weird edge cases requiring an arbiter an inevitability, and chess, a game that's surely simple enough that it's reasonable to expect the rules to cover all on-board actions.
That said, if you have any specific examples here I'd love to hear them. I know of some absolutely batshit things that are technically possible in MtG, but I'm not sure I've heard of any stories of them happening in ostensibly legal tournament play.
(Since we're discussing absurd rules lawyering in TCGs now, you may be interested in the legendary 3000 card Yu-Gi-Oh! deck that was once played in a tournament setting)
But really I don't think any of the rules of chess ever unambiguously allowed either of the things you said, they are both extreme rules lawyering primarily known for their humorous value, and the rules being clarified they aren't allowed doesn't prove they were allowed before. E.g. 0-0-0-0-0 claimed a pawn promoted to a rook is "a piece that hasn't moved", and easily could have been rejected as saying it is the same piece that moved while it was a pawn.
En Passant is widely know and explicitly specified in the rules, taught, and played by even low level players, so there's no way it's similar.
I think it's impossible to know unless you can find a case where someone actually attempted the moves, but I feel pretty confident they just wouldn't have been allowed and if you tried a similar gag at a rated chess event today the arbiter would just tell you that you're crazy.
It's literally on the wikipedia entries, respectively:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling "Castling was added to European chess in the 14th or 15th century and did not develop into its present form until the 17th century. The Asian versions of chess do not have such a move. "
"Castling was added to allow the king to get to a safer location and to allow rooks to get into the game earlier (Davidson 1981:16). "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passant "The motivation for en passant was to prevent the newly added two-square first move for pawns from allowing a pawn to evade capture by an enemy pawn.[14]:16 "
The two-square pawn move is commonly regarded as being introduced in order to make the game faster/more dynamic.