[jesterswilde]

Chess and Go are very different in that one is for points and the other is for annihilation. However, Go solved the draw (and first player advantage) with 'komi'. Giving white (the second player) some extra points, I think it's usually around 6.5 points right now. The amount that komi should be is still up for debate and changing, though I think everyone agrees the half portion is good.

Though stronger players can no longer give 'presents', where you force a draw on a weaker opponent by ensuring both players end up with the same amount of points.

Is there amendment to chess that could work similarly? Nothing is coming to mind, but Chess is not my domain.

[pmontra]

Actually komi in go solves the problem that black won nearly all the even games between strong players, except when white was an exceptionally strong player.

Hence the original 4.5 points komi about 100 years ago. The half point is the part that turns a draw into a win for white, that starts playing after black. But it's not strictly necessary: we could state in the rules that white wins draws.

Black started playing less conservatively and komi was soon adjusted to 5.5 points. It became 6.5 points at the turn of the century. It's 7.5 with Chinese and area rules.

This variant of chess seems to me potentially unfair to the player that gets a bad starting position, one that loses most games or that could even be winning but only with a narrow and difficult path to find. It could work in a tournament if all players have to play all the initial configurations. In thnk

[kadoban]

Just for fun: it is worth noting that there were/are other solutions to the "black wins" problem, usually in the form of playing multiple games and alternating colors, and stuff like kadoban formats where if you win multiple times you start getting pushed to get progressively larger handicaps and see if you can win then.

[IvanChess744v3]

Chess 960 was done to address memorized openings and,to a certain degree,the issue of draws.

But Chess960's castling mechanism is totally unintuitive. So, Chess 744 was born. The exact mechanic (rook moves to king and king swings behind it) from standard chess is used and all of chess 960's setups that had a rook and the king in a corner were removed. This website goes into detail. There is no better method, IMHO, of creating an intuitive chess variation that addresses this issue. It is very hard and unintuitive in Chess 960 to remember where to move your pieces to castle and whether or not it is even legal given the squares the king has to move through.

https://sites.google.com/view/chess-744/todays-744-game

[arunix]

Could you add a diagram showing how castling works in this?

[IvanChess744v3]

I can later (short on time this morning), and I plan to add diagrams to the website and a video discussing it.

Basically, the rook, assuming the spaces are open and he and the rook havent moved, either moves adjacent to the king (if he isnt already adjacent) and the king moves two spaces around him.

[kadoban]

Go doesn't really have the draw problem. Scoring is sharper in go, so even with integer komi you don't see enough draws to really be a problem. Only reason you _really_ need non-integer komi is if you're running a tournament or rating system that can't accomodate them at all.

Even on 9x9, like look at GoQuest for example, they must have thousands of game a day at 7 komi and ~nobody complains if there's a jigo, it just means the game was really close.

In chess the problem is just high level play has _so_ very many draws, so it can be worth trying to reduce that.

In go you get a draw once in a while. In chess you get a draw by default and have to really work to avoid it (assuming you're at a level vastly vastly higher than I am).

[golli]

I think the only solution is to just abolish draws like the Armageddon chess mode does, where a draw is counted as a win for black.

And then have either an imbalance in allowed time for each player or have them bid on it.