Check out Symmetric Chess, our featured variant for March, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Sam Trenholme wrote on Wed, Mar 15, 2006 06:52 PM UTC:
A lot of draws often times indicates that a game is unbalanced; basically, a weak player can force a draw against a strong player. As it turns out, it's actually harder to fix a drawish game than it is to fix a game where white always win; a 'white always wins' game can usually be fixed with the pie rule; a drawn game needs to be fixed by changing the game to be less drawn (usually by making attack stronger and defense weaker) [1].

Here is some empirical evidence:

Game# games played# drawsDraw %
FIDE Chess (on game courier)3100%
FIDE Chess (on Brainking)5757324544.26%
Grand Chess1400%
Catapults of Troy8337.5%

In order to make sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison: I have included two other games from the same game server that the Catapults games were played on. I have also included statistics from a real-time server, BrainKing, since this server has a large number of games, and since you mentioned that correspondence games will have more draws.

I'm sure you won't do this, but if you ever change your mind and incorporate my ideas, you can still keep the same copyright on Catapults of Troy (then again, you can't copyright ideas, only artistic expression). :-p

- Sam

[1] Chess-like games can usually be made less drawish by adding Shogi drops to the game.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Catapults of Troy

Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.