Aside from make draw offers last longer; the only other serious idea I found interesting among ChessBase.com’s six articles on the draw problems topic was by Tim Kett of Cardiff Wales.
The Sofia rule kinda sets a minimum number of move-pairs that must be completed before a draw offer can be offered or accepted.
Tim said the Sofia rule should also specify a minimum amount of clock time that must have passed before a draw offer can be offered or accepted. Tim suggested 3-4 hours.
This idea would fail to reduce the high draw rate, but it is still logical and practical.
For elite grandmaster chess, the high draw rate problem is unfixible under today’s chess rules. No idea will ever succeed in reducing the high draw rate (unless players are bribed with distorted “prize” money).
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Like 14B6, 20J, and 20L with current/common prize structures? Or only DIFFERENT rules?
Which is more likely:
1 Players arranging a result (win or loss) without really making an effort to play the game out because the prize rules encourage it.
2. Players arranging a result (agreed draw) without really making an effort to play the game out because the prize rules encourage it.
It seems to me that #2 is far more likely. Personally, I doubt we’d see all that many cases of #1 because there isn’t typically all that MUCH encouragement to make up for danger (a. of being caught, b. of the winner keeping all the money anyway) and the embarrassment of losing. I just haven’t heard nearly as much about collusion of type #1 under the current prize structures (and there are lots of cases where, for example, a 4.0 will yield a prize but a 3.5 won’t).
I think we should be more concerned about #2 – it just seems to be the more prevalent problem – and I don’t think we need to be too concerned about creating “an adversarial relationship” from a plus-score format. The bigger problem is the common, repeated violations of the rules at the highest level of the game THAT WE HAVE RIGHT NOW.
When I cleaned my database of over 3,000,000 games by removing any game that was 14 moves or less and drawn, it turned out to be nearly 2% of all games in the past 40 years or so. On the other hand, when I looked for won/loss games in less than 14 moves, they were nearly non-existent. I even came across a “GM draw” between Karpov and Kasparov. (I think it was like 10 or 11 moves.)
We need to accept that we’ll never eliminate the short draw / professional draw or whatever you want to call.
I practice two methods which in my RR norm events has proven quite effective - one being no draw offer prior to 30 moves unless repetition of position, stalemate, or no mating material. It’s not draw proof but I have seen in my events the number of draws drastically drop.
The other only works in round robin or other invitational type tournaments - just don’t invite those players that have a propensity for professional draws. I’ve done this and it’s worked. Of course this doesn’t work in Swiss events.
Sevan,
I like your 30 move-pair rule. But let me engage a philosophical debate…
I am curious: Not counting the tournament participants, what percentage of people who are aware of your tournaments study or replay the gamescores of drawn games from your tournaments?
I would guess the percentage is in the single digits, say 18%.
So how are the other 82% affected in any way by the difference between an unfought 30 move-pair draw versus a hard-fought 40 move-pair draw?
I believe the 82% are unaffected. Which begs the question of why an unfought draw is so bad yet a hard-fought draw is plenty fine? A difference unperceived is no difference. To them all draws are less interesting than decisive games.
When I have a little free time, I might browse to the web site for the current major chess tournament, Dortmund or whatever. I see that yesterday’s game had to decisive games and two drawn games. I have time to replay one of the games. Of course I pick one of the decisive games to replay.
The length or nature of the drawn games is outside my perceptual realm in such cases.
Gene - the purpose of this rule was two fold for me. First it greatly improved the number of decisive games in my events. Second, it was to handle the situation that was created from my first event with the event sponsors. In my first event in April 2005 a very large percentage of games were short draws which angered the event sponsors.
I disagree with your assessment that only a small percentage of players will replay a long fought draw. I find more people will because there is a great deal to learn from them especially if its a stubborn defending draw. And its simple enough to pass by the quick draw since they are looking quickly at a pgn viewer.
Have you guys seen the ten-move stalemate? I’m doing this from my head so I hope I get this right.
1.c4 a5 2.h4 h5 3.Qa4 Ra6 4.Qxa5 Rah6 5.Qxc7 f6
6.Qxd7+ Kf7 7.Qxb7 Qd3 8.Qxb8 Qh7 9.Qxc8 Kg6 10.Qe6 stalemate
I heard a couple of punks used that once to get around some anti-draw rules. I must say it takes a lot of mutual trust to pull off that game though.
I think the best idea to avoid draws for a weekly event like a club championship is an elimination event like the World Cup (losers can be entered into a Swiss). That is, as a sponsor. As a director, I don’t care enough except to enforce the rules already on the books for those stupid enough to break them. For one-day events, if I were the sponsor, I would support the 30-move no-draw rule as the best you can hope for.
I once sponsored a rapid event where I paid out prizes to each participant for their wins, and the house kept all money for draws. That was a natural disincentive for draws since most people are at least ethical enough to not blatantly throw a game in front of their friends. Not sure I’d like to test that at higher stakes though.
It actually looks to me like these two worked VERY hard to find this and probably had a great laugh (and still do) over this thing. Thanks! I am still laughing about this game. It appears to be a variation of this:
There is also a 12-move stalemate involving no captures. All 32 pieces are still on the board after 12 moves, and the position is stalemate. It’s in How to Cheat at Chess.
So you’re using a single statement as the basis of your theory? Or from a small representation of people that post on Mig’s blog which can’t even be considered any form of a statistical sample group?
How many digits in “18”, again? Joking aside, I suspect you are simply wrong.
I look first at games played in the openings I’m interested in; then at games by players I like. In neither case would I care about the result, except to skip obviously unfought draws (most of the time I can tell if the game never left theory). I’d expect most active tournament players to do pretty much the same.
As another organizer, I can second that. The potential sponsors I talk to aren’t interested in agreed draws at all: “You mean the players can just decide to quit and go home without anyone losing? For no reason other than they’re bored? And you want me to pay them prize money for that?”
I’ve considered trying some sort of tiebreak to ensure no round ends with a half-point score. The dark side of me suggests a coin flip: “Hey, you just demonstrated that there’s no real difference between you two, so random chance is as good a differentiator as any. Right? Call it.”
Make each round consist of 4 g/30 mini-matches with a blitz tiebreak (4 blitz games, then one game with time advantage to white and draw odds to Black).
Set up the pieces and play again if it’s a draw, with ever-shortening time controls.
At this point I’m almost ready to try anything. I like to watch good chess games, but when the top players in the event play lifeless draws with each other I get cheated. Makes me wonder why I bother to organize at all. I work hard, but they won’t. It fails the “fair” test.
Not crazy about ending with the “armageddon” game. If the tournament is a Swiss or a round-robin, why not just have a single long time-control game followed by a series of blitz games, sudden-death? In practice, nobody ever draws four 5-minute games in a row.
Even in a knowckout, I’d rather see them play normal blitz until somebody drops.
Early in the last century, there were some tournaments where an initial draw got a quarter-point, and the winner of a playoff got an extra half-point (i.e., won .75-.25). That strikes me as a nice idea–surely holding a draw should get you something, especially if you combine playoffs with Sofia rules.
(Personally, I think Sofia rules are sufficient, but I’m not an organizer.)
Because “In practice, nobody ever …” is a sentence an organizer can’t depend on. Let me tell you about an event I organized just a few years ago. I had heard some players complaining about sudden-death time controls so I decided I’d go ahead and give them something special. I ran an event with two rounds per day, seven hours between rounds, at 40/2 25/1 time controls. And by the end of round 4 one player had two (2!) adjourned games pending (and the R4 game ran late into the night as well).
I wanted an absolute end to the chain of tiebreakers because in the life of every tournament there comes a point when the TD has to shoot the players and get on with pairing the next round. I arranged the blitz games in sets of two to try and eliminate the color factor, but I’d be just as fine with making it 4 (or 5) blitz games as sudden death, as long as the armageddon game was still looming at the end, so that we could be sure of getting all the games over in time to pair the next round.
It actually looks to me like these two worked VERY hard to find this and probably had a great laugh (and still do) over this thing. Thanks! I am still laughing about this game. It appears to be a variation of this: