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Really? Insufficient material? What if the opponent has insufficient material?
For a drawless chess, amend FIDE rules as follows: 1. Stalemate is a loss for the stalemated player. 2. Triple repetion is a loss for the repeating player. 3. If fifty moves by both sides have elapsed since the last capture or Pawn move, the player who made the last capture or Pawn move may claim a win.
After 40 years of tournament chess, I can imagine a lot of positions. For example: WHITE K(a1) and B(d3), BLACK K(a3) and N(d2), followed by the moves 1.Bb1 Nb3 checkmate. Conclusion: Rule 3 of Showdown Chess does not forbid the endgame K+B versus K+N.
Fergus Duniho used the word 'recursive' in an earlier post. Which raises a host of additional questions.
In dealing with situations such as K+N vs K+B, I cannot imagine the position in which the K+N mates, and the K+B mate would be hard to achieve. I forsee a bigger problem being a K+R vs K+R endgame. One solution to this problem is to exclude some multi-piece endgames as illegal position. This would make the game more complex, as tactical exchaning sequences would have to be evaluated for their legality. This could make the game more interesting on one hand.
actually the case of kings on a1 and c2 pawn on a2 is a success for showdown chess because it makes a win for black instead of a draw, which would happen in normal chess after white plays Kc1 (this is a replacement for normal chess not shatranj). Black must of played the brilliant (he he) ... a3-a2!! thus winning the game. You are just looking at the 'normal' rules if you are disappointed at 'having' to move your king away, you should not of got yourself in that position. Of course, i don't like these attempts to make chess with less draws, i am in favor of giving (as far as tournaments go) either no points for draws, same as losing, or 2 points for wins, half for draws, but best would be to come up with a different chess altogether ha ha, but not those variants with rook/knight and bishop/knight combo's. Terrible pieces :) we should go back to good old 4 handed chaturanga :) anyway, showdown chess is at least an attempt to somehow address the major promblem of the terrible state of draws in modern chess, i don't think it deserves a 'poor' rating so i will throw in a 'good'.
Last time I checked the Canadian rulebook, the endgame K+N against K+B was considered to allow the possibility of checkmate for either side (after some truly bad play). Thus either player can forfeit the game after exceeding the time limit. On the other hand, I believe the USCF rulebook has an actual list of 'silly' drawn endgames. Showdown Chess REQUIRES the two players to continue this endgame until there is a decisive result. Adrian King's Scirocco ALLOWS one player to continue this endgame.
Consider the position: WHITE K(c2) BLACK K(a1) and P(a2). Now White can score a stalemate victory in Shatranj and some other games by simply moving the King to c1. I am not happy with any rule which forces White to move away and lose the game. Showdown Chess is not a game I would want to play.
I see no good reason for making a blanket rule like: 'Draw offers are not allowed'. In his detailed notes to Scirocco (1999) Adrian King wrote: 'It is conceivable that both players may be reduced to a small number of weak but highly mobile pieces, so that the repetition rule must be invoked to determine who wins the game. For example, each player might have an Emperor and a Harpy. In this case, the 2 sides can wander aimlessly about the board for an astronomical number of moves before the repetition rule finally cuts off one player or the other, and figuring out which player will lose is an absurdly difficult proposition (I think. I haven't actually tried to prove this; there may be some mathematical shortcut that makes the winner in this case obvious). In such a case, unless the players are particularly pigheaded, they should agree to the draw.'
I assume the rule against making a stalemating move will have to be recursive. Stalemate is when a player has no legal moves, and this rule additionally makes it illegal to leave your opponent with no legal moves. Thus, you would be stalemated if you could, in Chess, stalemate your opponent but had no other legal moves. But it would be illegal for your opponent to put you in such a position, and so on and so on.
the way chess is going, i would say it would give black a big advantage.
On the subject of making variants that eliminate chess draws: Has anyone tried a 'Maker-Breaker' variant, where White (as 'Maker') wins in the usual way and Black ('Breaker') wins merely by making it impossible for White to win? (So, 'draws' would be counted as wins for Black.) Would that give Black too much of an advantage?
Hmm. Some of these rules will probably need to be spelled out more. For instance, it's illegal to make a move that results in insufficient mating material. Does that mean that when either player gets down to a set of pieces that can't be reduced further and still be able to force mate, his remaining pieces become uncapturable? But won't the conventional ideas of how much material is sufficient to force mating have to be revised, in light of this invulnerability rule? And the fact that no move is allowed that would result in stalemate might also affect the issue, I think. More fundamentally, is it allowed for one player to be reduced below the level where he could force mate, as long as the other one is not?
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I don't think the rules as given are viable. Stalemate is defined as a condition where you don't have legal moves, but are not in check. Making a move illegal that cause stalemate thus makes a recursive definition, where it is not clear that the recursion will always terminate.
They also do not address the 50-move problem. What if a game ends in K+R vs K+R? There exists over 10 million positions with this material, so it would be really tedious to force a repeat. But since there is no way to force checkmate, you would eventually be forced to repeat. Which is illegal. But you might not be in check. which makes it a stalemate. Which makes the previous move illegal. But other moves there might (directly or indirectly) suffer from the same problem, so now that position would be a stalemate too. Etc.
I suppose that eventually one of the players would be forced to sacrifice its Rook as the only legal option, but it seems pretty much undeterminable which player that would be. That applies to every position that under normal rules would be a dead draw, e.g. K+B+N vs K+B+N.