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Suppose a Tournament Organizer pre-announced a rule change – that STALEMATES would be treated as a LOSS for the player who had no legal move.
Would the games from such a tournament be acceptable to the USCF for formal rating, like any other chess game?
Thanks.
You might want to post this in the Tournament forum.
I would certainly hope not. This would be such a basic change in the game, that you might as well be allowed to rate a tiddly-winks tournament as though it were a chess tournament.
Bill Smythe
Gene,
Is this a hypothetical, or has someone actually proposed this?
Alex Relyea
Alex,
This is in-between a hypothetical and a reality.
The case for allowing Stalemate to be decisive (instead of a draw) is at least as strong for other modified games that the USCF accepts as rateable.
Stalemate as decisive was the chess rule into the 1800’s. It has also been re-proposed many times in recent years, as a partial solution to the massive draw problem we too often take for granted.
Note Kramnik’s stalemate of Anand in yesterday’s round 3.
I assume the answer for the Stalemate question must be “Yes such games are rateable”, so that the USCF’s policies would be internally consistent.
I am not here speaking either for or against Stalemate as decisive. But…
I am speaking in favor of an environment that gives ideas a chance to succeed or fail as each individually merits. The rateability of these slightly off-rule chess games creates that healthy environment, and at no extra $ cost to the USCF.
A Stalemate as decisive rule need not be written into the one USCF rule book (controlled by the McKay Publishing company). Individual Tournament Organizers should be free to pre-announce such rule modifications; just as they can announce that for their tournament it is legal to write-erase-rewrite your tentative move before you finally make a move.
Thanks.
IMO, it would not be rateable. It would be such a different game, you’d have to throw out every endgame book. It’s a much larger change than chess960, which doesn’t seem all that much worse than an opening-themed tournament, to me.
I’m not aware of any other variants that would even come close to being this disruptive that have been allowed to be rated.
The problem with draws isn’t the occasional stalemate – it’s GMs agreeing to a draw after no more than a move or two. That’s a completely different problem, IMO, that has NOTHING to do with the rules on stalemates.
There is a difference between rating and scoring. If BAP (black added point) tournaments are rateable with the wins, draws and losses rated as if they had a normal score (I’m not sure, but I think it is rateable), then a Stalemate-scored-as-a-loss-but-rated-as-a-draw tournament would seem to also be rateable.
You would have to define what happens in a position like a lone white king moving from d2 to c2 to stalemate a black king that just captured a piece on a1 (maybe white’s rook that was on the first rank to trade itself for the queening pawn) with its only other piece being a pawn on a2. This variation turns a drawn position into a bare-king win.
Gene,
I’m sorry, but what other “modified games” does the USCF accept as ratable? I can see that thematics are ratable, but they don’t involve any rules modifications, they only require each player to agree to make the same first moves.
Alex Relyea
BAP and other scoring variations for awarding prizes don’t actually affect the rules of the game. A draw would still be reported as a draw, for rating purposes. Even so, I think they would be considered major variations and require advance notice.
OTOH, changes of fundamental rules, like stalemate, yield a game that’s no longer “chess”, IMO. These should not be rated.
.
No rule mod?
The rules of chess give you the right to make any legal move for your first ply, regardless of anything you said before the game began.
It sounds like a pre-announcement of…
“Stalemator gets 1 point and Stalematee gets 0 points”
…would be acceptable just as BAP is – IF the Tournament Organizer submitted Stalemate outcomes to be rated a draw. You make a fair point.
Yet there is some kind of discrepancy here, a bending of something.
These are at least gray areas.
Should organizers also be free to disallow two-square pawn moves, allow castling through check, and prohibit promotion to a queen if there is already a queen on the board? Some things are so basic that variations simply cannot be allowed.
In the case of stalemate-is-decisive, please note that even K+RP vs K would be a forced win under this rule.
Bill Smythe
It’s a borderline case. You can pair any way you want to – it would be perfectly legitimate to decide the “pairing score” each round by throwing darts, preferably not at the players. However, announcing that stalemate will be scored as a win (no matter how unlikely it is to occur in practice) could affect the decisions the players make during the game, and therefore it should not be allowed. To take a reductio ad absurdum, suppose an organizer announced that, while the games would be rated normally, for pairing and prize purposes the loser would receive one point and the winner zero. I don’t think so.
If the point of this idea is to reduce the number of draws, I think it’s pretty silly. A player who agrees to a draw at move 15 because he doesn’t want to take a risk is not going to be impressed by very small chance of “winning” by stalemate fifty moves later.
I agree with John’s reasoning about stalemate as draw potentially impacting decisions a player makes during the game. That reasoning, however, applies equally to BAP, so it seems to me that both should be ratable or both should be unratable. I tend towards the latter.
As I said, it’s a borderline case. I think BAP can be distinguished from stalemate/win in that the former could lead a player to play more aggressively and try to avoid a draw, but the latter could result in his trying to reach a position which would ordinarily be rejected as “clearly drawn.” After all, offering a bonus for clear first might also lead a player to disdain a draw, and no one claims that would be unratable. But it’s a close point, and I don’t feel strongly about it.
BAP is a scoring/pairing system, and pairings are irrelevant as far as the computation of ratings is concerned. A draw as defined in the rules (including stalemate) is a draw as far as the ratings system is concerned, regardless of how it affected scoring or pairing at that event.
Except for match-rule restrictions, the ratings system does not care WHY two players played each other.
Thematic tournaments are ratable largely because nobody FORCED you to play in that event. If you don’t want to play games with, say, the Kings Gambit Accepted and have them rated, don’t play in a KGA thematic event.
Time and piece odds games are in general not USCF ratable because the conditions of equality for all players no longer exist. (Equality still exists in a thematic event, all players with White or with Black get treated equally.)
I suppose if someone wanted to submit an event where White gets 5 minutes and Black gets 7 minutes (which is similar to the playoffs that some events use), the USCF office would have to decide if that meets the conditions of equality required for a ratable event.
Ken Sloan has made some interesting comments about time odds in the past, they’re worth searching for.
BTW, I agree that a moderator should move this topic to the ‘Tournament Organization’ forum.
I do not agree that this topic should be moved.
Um, I woold agree if we still had one.
We still have 3 moderators.
Yes we do, but we no longer have a “Tournament Organization” forum. That and “Tournament Direction” have been combined into “Chess Tournaments.”
Which caused considerable confusion for Moderator7 for awhile…