I find this rule fundamentally stupid. If the king is not in check, cannot move but is the only piece that can move, it should be forced to move to an attacked square and be taken and lost.
Imagine if this was done at boxing. You hit your oponent and he goes down but cannot get up. By dumb chess logic as you are not allowed to hit him when hes down and he cannot get up, its a draw. So dumb.
That is all.
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A stalemate is more a loss for the attacker, they have failed in checkmating the king and they did not earn the win. I don’t think chess is remotely comparable to boxing so that analogy doesn’t work so well but if you want an analogy to sports it’s more equivalent to a scoreless game like in hockey prior to the shootout rule
Edit: check mate means the king is dead (shah mat). A stalemate does not kill the king, it traps him.
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I think it’s a pretty clever catch-up mechanic that adds another dimension to high level play.
Looks like someone got overconfident and accidentally stalemated their opponent in a winning position lmfao
But you didn’t ‘hit’ your opponent in your analogy. He’s just standing around in the corner. That’s not really a win, is it?
When the Dragon of the West laid siege to Ba Sing Se had the Earth King lost? No. Could he go anywhere? Also no. It was a standstill. Only once the Fire Nation invaded his walls and he had to give up his crown was the city defeated.
I mean, at casual levels of play it makes sense to not have that rule, but in higher levels it does.
If you fail to win in a game of strategy, you shouldn’t win by default because youre opponent cant win either
I get it but that problem lies with the attacker. You failed to set up your win so its a draw
First of all the boxing analogy makes no sense? They are not even relatively close. They are really different sports and have a different set of rules.
>Imagine if this was done at boxing. You hit your oponent and he goes down but cannot get up.
In boxing this is a knockout and you win?
Chess is a strategy game with the main goal of winning. So if you can’t strategize within the rules of the game and trap the king you don’t deserve to win. Hell if you’d said you should lose I might’ve agreed with you.
Oh it even used to be a loss for the person who delivered the stalemate. Because the main goal of chess is to deliver checkmate, but obey two people moving alternatingly. It is a bit arbitrary, but there are also a bunch of positions where a stalemate=loss would be extremely dumb. A King can block a pawn on the side of the board and prevent it from upgrading to a Queen. The person with the extra pawn has no way to deliver checkmate if the defending king plays it well.
Stalemate is almost always avoidable. Rewarding someone for being careless doesn’t make sense
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, I’m no chess expert, but doesn’t this kinds of draws usually happen when you have a way bigger army than the one who should be losing?
If you couldn’t checkmate the other’s king who lost his army and you have a way better kit, I think you deserve the stalemate. This rule also forces arrogant players to finish the game faster, and gives the losing side a second chance to not lose and force a stalemate
Your analogy is wrong. It’s more like your opponent is tired and you throw a strong punch but miss completely due to your own error.
Your argument is that should count as a KO because if you had hit your opponent they probably would’ve been knocked out so your ”close enough” punch should count the same as a KO
Hopefully now you see why your original argument is dumb
similarly, I greatly dislike ‘defensive only’ players who won’t much advance their pcs and trade even value pcs deaths as their last resort.
Fine for a competition or playing for $ but if we are playing for pride/fun I respect high offense much much more than high winning, grind out mudfest games suck.
I answered this a few months ago.
A core part of chess strategy is predicting your opponents next move.
If you did not do that well enough to see that the king is not in check and has no moves, you lose. Because your strategy wasn’t good enough.
A forced draw isn’t an easy out for a losing opponent. (Okay, at low elo it kinda is) It’s punishment for your mistakes.
This is a feature of the game. Not an oversight.
At top levels, this would be way to decisive an advantage for the attacker.
It feels like saying you didn’t overthrow the king, because he is just in jail, not dead.
It really doesn’t make any sense. If the king can’t move without dying, then the king has lost. It should not be a draw
r/chess try to argue with them
Its like saying a football game should be won if you have have 100% of the possession. The goal isn’t to have the ball, the goal is to put it in the net. Stalemate is you failing to put it in the net.
Honestly chess would be so much fun without announcing checks, but simply if you take the king you win
this guy’s en passant crashout is gonna be legendary
I agree with OP.
I honestly think the game is better for having this rule.
It keeps the tension going until the last move and gives players who have fallen behind an objective to play towards.
If you’ve amassed a significant material advantage and you’re unable to convert that into a checkmate, then you don’t deserve the win.
Mystery solved: OP does not play chess at all.
There are a lot of people restating the current rules as if they are logically necessary.
OP understands that the existing rule requires you make a move to create checkmate. Under these rules, creating a stalemate situation was poor strategy.
But OP is suggesting a different rule, in which creating a trapped position where the opposing king is forced to move into check would result in a win.
Conceptually, if you think about checkmate it just means there is no where to move that gets you out of check. A stalemate is really the same condition: there is no where you can move that doesn’t have you in check.
It seems like some of you can’t even imagine that creating this trapped scenario could be considered skill, because under the current rules, it’s bad strategy.
OP to feel better about this rule, remember that throughout the game you can’t legally move your king into check. It’s not just at endgame when the king is “trapped.” Since the king can never move into check, a stalemate is just the result of a particular scenario under this blanket rule.
Wait. What?!? So all those games I’ve lost due to not being able to move without setting myself in checkmate, was actually a draw???
There’s a reason game rules generally aren’t decided by beginners
Odd that you didn’t use the term Stalemate.
In highschool we played a variant called “snap king”. Where you only won by capturing the king. Rule differences:
Overall, its a cheesey variant. The biggest difference is someone suddenly loses because they don’t see a check or pin.
I also was frustrated by this at first, but it makes sense to me. Just don’t do it? The whole point is to outsmart your opponent. You failed to do so if you stalemate instead of checkmate. It’s like why reward someone for failing to complete the game winning condition
Both Kings belong to nuclear superpowers. If you fail to checkmate while giving your opponent no viable moves they’ll resort to nukes, which is responded to with nukes lore wise. A draw with no winners.
I was in a competition and managed to trick my opponent into stalemating me. I was proud of being able to turn an unwinnable situation into a draw.
I actually agree with this. A shame we can’t toggle this as a setting in digital versions of chess.
My 10 year old wouldn’t believe his misfortune when he cornered my king into a stalemate in a recent game. He wouldn’t believe me or chess.com. He seemed convinced I rigged the game, lol.
This is actually a rule in Xiangqi or Chinese Chess. If a player is forced into a position where they no longer have any legal move, that player loses the game.
This was the case in the past, and certainly it makes sense in theory to argue that a stalemate should be counted as a win.
However, in practice having the white pieces is already a significant advantage (if we ignore draws, white wins about 60% of decisive games between strong players). Getting rid of stalemate draws will certainly increase the number of wins, but mostly in white’s favour, making the game even more unbalanced. Audiences may hate watching boring draws, but a game where one side can be assumed to win 70+% of games could have its own issues.
This may not be a problem in a match format (where two players play an equal number of games with white and with black so it evens out), but it could be awkward for tournaments, especially if they have an uneven number of rounds. Not that these problems couldn’t be dealt with somehow, but whether it’s really worth it is another matter.
Edit: I found a study which partly contradicts my statements, claiming instead that getting rid of stalemate wouldn’t necessarily change the draw rate all that much (and even many endgames can be defended even without stalemate to a greater extent than I imagined). However, this was based on an engine playing against itself, which is not necessarily a good representation of human play. (And even then, the data suggested that a risky opening like the King’s Gambit becomes even riskier without stalemate draws).
Nope making it a draw gives some really interesting counterplay. At higher levels it means that a player who has less material can play so they don’t lose, or better yet exploit the potential stalemate to even the playing field.