I would think that the rating thing would work it way to an equilibrium eventually as lower rated player became the higher rated player etc etc.
Sooner or later only the players that deserved it would be higher rated.
There is also no reason that this couldn’t be approached from the other direction with the higher rated player having the win when the game is drawn.
Sort of like if World Championship match ends in a tie the Champion retains his or her title.
Justification would be once you get to the top then you will have the same advantage.
Personally I like the lower rated having the draw odds because I think that would level the playing field better.
The advantage to this idea is its’ simplicity.
And if you really wanted to maintain the same rating system one could simply have wins and drawwins and drawlosses that are rated like they are now. But a win scores 1 and a drawing scores 1.
But the other way might be more interesting.
How about a compromise ( 
): the lower rated player gets draw odds when I am lower rated and the higher rated player gets draw odds when I am higher rated.
I don’t think it would work its way to a reasonable equilibrium, unless it is one where no player’s rating is closer to any other player’s rating than the number of points needed to offset the draw-odds, i.e. the draw odds never reverses the probabilities. That would reduce (not eliminate) the randomizing effect of such a rule.
If the offsetting rating difference for the draw-rule is 50 points, this means that if ratings must be between 0 and 3000, we could accommodate 61 players in the rating system. Maybe more if people never played outside their hometowns. Perhaps I exaggerate …
A similar randomizing effect exists now because colors do affect expected game results but are not included in how we rate those results. But the effect is smaller I think. Actually this is a good question: is the effect smaller, how do the magnitudes compare?
Do you think that under this proposed rule, a much different set of players would obtain high ratings than under our existing system? I had not thought of that, if it is what you mean. Do you think that new set would be more deserving of it than the current set?
I think that higher rated players that lose then become lower rated players and will then run into a higher rated player and win. So they would then win their loss rating points back. That’s what I mean by equalize. So even the result of a drawn/win against a player 1 rating point less would disappear when the player was unable to win against a player 1 point less than him.
So there would be instances where a player might be temporarily higher rated than their actual strength. Which we probably already have anyway with the current system.
My argument against my suggestion is that is may be interesting but completely unneccessary. I like the fact that you can be losing a game yet maybe fight to salvage at least a draw.
The people that want to reduce draws should clarify that what they really want to reduce is agreed upon draws.
The solution there is to simply ban agreed upon draws. Play it out.
if the players agreed to a draw, it would be Played Out in at most 5 more moves anyway (3rd repetition), that would be Sousa’d as well. the song has only two notes.
Granted that all repetitions aren’t forced. Oftentimes the issue for one player is if they make another move they lose major material and the other player forcing the issue is either behind in material or feels a draw against a higher rated player is worthwhile.
But if the players are just moving their pieces back and forth I think that would be frowned on even more than the now legal draw offers.
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The only nontraditional scoring system in use by any serious tournament is the Bilbao scoring system. Instead of the points for W/D/L being 1/.5/0, Bilbao awards 3/1/0. There is no White vs Black point discrepancy in Bilbao.
The Bilbao idea gained momentum when the European soccer (or “football”) leagues adopted it due to the awful problem of low scoring (perhaps they decided the idea of making the goal a little bigger was too weird).
On ChessBase.com there have been several articles that discuss the pros and cons of Bilbao. One such article is:
Bilbao on ChessBase.com, =4253
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=4253
To find the others with Google.com, search with:
site:chessbase.com bilbao
This quoted statement from Nocab, considered against the thread title he chose of “A simple proposal to reduce draws”, leaves me unable to determine which weakness of chess he is targeting:
** White’s unfair advantage over Black
** The high draw rate in elite grandmaster chess
These two unsporting weaknesses would be major issues against chess by any ESPN or other media outlet that might ever consider getting serious about chess promotion.
DRAW RATE
The Bilbao point system was adopted to combat the high draw rate problem, or at least the rate of “short wink grandmaster draws” that dominate the late rounds of major tournaments. (Clint Ballard’s BAP scoring had the same goal.)
Statistics gathered from 3-4 years now prove the Bilbao scoring has had almost zero effect on the high draw rate.
Also, I think in each year the winner under Bilbao would have won under traditional scoring too (unsure if there was one exception?).
Overall Bilbao has been an interesting experiment that could now be dropped. The Sofia rule is a better way to prevent short wink draws. However, the Sofia rule has also had no effect on the high draw rate; it has only made the draws longer.
WHITE’S ADVANTAGE
Nocab’s motive for proposing an alternative point system is to fix the problem of White’s advantage (not the draw rate). White’s advantage also hurts chess as a sport.
ChessBase.com also had several articles that discussed the unfirmly named “Christmas rule” or “Fair First Move” (FFM) rule. This rule is used in the 3M board game TwixT (on Wikipedia). For example:
FFM on ChessBase
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=4612
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