The main thing to decrease draws seems to be shorter time format, but the Blitz championship seems to attract less attention than the classical, and of course blunders are more likely, which is a double edged sword.
Maybe the next WCC will be more exciting, since Alireza probably has far better winning odds, or if Magnus doesn't compete then the challengers won't be terrified into playing 14 Berlin draw lines.
(For those who don't know why Magnus may not compete: https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/chess/only-alireza-... - first decent looking article I found)
The issue is that chess has lost its ability to make rule changes, like komi, superko, passing stones or whatever.
We can erase draws from chess with Black wins stalemates, white wins 50 move / three move repetitions.
It used to have adjournments where the Russians had a tremendous advantage. When Fischer played Botvinnik at the Olympiad in 1962, they adjourned. Fischer sealed his 45th move and Botvinnik gave the position to his seconds who sent it to Moscow to a room full of GMs. Botvinnik himself went to sleep and woke up to be handed a saving brilliancy.
The time format also really changed in that rapid and blitz are heavily contested. Magnus and the other super GMs even play bullet.
There has been some interest in FischerRandom or Chess 960.
Not a rule change, but computers have democratized chess and massively improved play. A modern GM would simply crush Tal. Stockfish taught a level of accuracy that is insane. And now players learn new strategies from Alpha Zero class machines.
Do people really want to give up all of the past 100-years of opening theory? I don't think so.
The #1 issue of Chess is "boring, everything's a draw". Well, good news. We can get rid of draws with "Stalemate == Black Wins. 50-move / 3-move repetition == White Wins".
Very small rule change. Not only that, it keeps Stalemate-practice as a key-study for Black players. So all the skills you've gained for the past 100 years (from opening theory, to stalemate practice) remains relevant.
Fischer Random / 960 is for people who want to throw away the entirety of chess opening theory. I'm sure that's a valid concern and/or criticism of chess, but I don't think its something the entire community agrees upon (after all: everyone keeps playing Chess / Shogi with exactly the same opening setup. There's something deeply cultural about keeping the setup the same for hundreds of years).
Maybe instead of stalemate you meant a draw where neither side has enough material to checkmate? If you make that a black win, white would always have to push for a win.
50 move / 3-move-repetition == White win.
This proposal has been discussed in chess forums on occasion, because Armageddon (all draws == Black wins) is too much in favor of Black.
Giving 50 move / 3-move-repetion to White should even the odds better, somewhere in between the current ruleset and the Armageddon ruleset.
The opening theory of the past wouldn't work with different winning conditions anyway.
Black is going for Stalemate right now, because its well known that Black is at a minor disadvantage against White.
White is going for win.
So opening theory won't change too much. It just formalizes the principle that Black will want to explicitly "draw" (by calling Stalemates a draw).
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Armageddon chess has demonstrated that "all draws are black-wins" is too much of an advantage however. The next best step is to take the 4 draw conditions (stalemate, insufficient material, 3-move repetition, 50-move rule) and divvy the 4-draw conditions up between black-and-white to better balance the game towards 50/50 chance.
I remember the Kramnik-DeepMind collaboration studied the stalemate=win variant, I don't remember what the results were.
What would be the wisdom of Black winning stalemates, though?
Ad-hoc balancing change. White currently has the advantage in chess. Any rule changes therefore, should be +Black advantage, to minimize the harm to the win/loss ratios.
Rule-changes should aim for 50/50 win/loss ratio between Black and White. Well... ideally we make a better game (and this "better game" probably is one with fewer draws). But if we're in a situation between two choices, one benefiting white and the second benefiting black... prefer to give the advantage to the weaker side.
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Armageddon Chess (Black wins all draws) has already been tried, and the advantage is distinctly Black. It fixes the draw problem by brute force, but it goes too far and now White is at a disadvantage. Splitting up the draws to mitigate Black's advantage under Armageddon rules would be preferred if 50/50 balance is considered the ideal.
This is not anywhere near balanced, though.
Of course this is not "classical chess," but it's used as a third line of tie-break in the classical championship.
This is also lame, since a world championship specifically for classical chess should not be decided by non-classical chess.
Black wins draws is a bit too inelegant, as that leads to a Black advantage. Splitting the draws into Stalemate / Impossible / 50-move end / 3-move repetition gives us 4 draw-conditions to "split" between the two players.
> This is also lame, since a world championship specifically for classical chess should not be decided by non-classical chess.
There's something to be said that classical chess is definitely becoming boring because of the frequency of draws... possibly due to the increase of computer analysis and advanced play we have today.
Some kind of "no-draw chess" should be the new classic chess standard applied to the game.
Many up and coming (young) players are also really exciting: Alireza, Duda, and Dubov. Duda’s win over Karjakin in the World Cup was pretty spectacular.