Single Comment

Shatranj Extended Tournament Scoring (S.E.T.S) Rules. An attempt at an improved scoring system for chess tournaments. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

💡📝Rich Hutnik wrote on Mon, Apr 28, 2008 01:44 PM UTC:

And in games where both players have no pawns left on the board? If Braves says as you state, it appears to me to turn chess in kinglet chess, where the objective is to capture all your opponent's board. You could award people 1/8 of a point for each pawn they have left, when their opponent has no pawns left. Kinglet chess win condition would actually be an interesting mutator to apply sometime. Actually the variations on extinction chess where one or more pieces types are considered royal, is an interesting one. In these games, I would suggest scoring = how many of those piece a player has left divided by number of those pieces on the board, as an interesting mutator. One could even integrate King capture, instead of checkmate, as one of these.

For people who have objections to SETS being 'too complicated' or has other issues, may I suggest:
1. It should only be used in tournament settings.
2. It could only be used when there is a dead draw to see who actually wins the game. You could also take the sum of all draws, in event a multi-game match ends in a complete draw, and go with the player who scored the most.
3. I suggest people propose other weighting or explaining why the conditions I laid out should be dropped as not being valid?
4. What I describe is detailed, because these are all the potential draw conditions that are in chess currently. Also, it looks to the original win conditions in Shatranj to get them also. Again, I would ask people to not throw out the baby with the bathwater here, but propose tweaks or propose your own approach that is like this.

I would also like to speak out to people who say, 'Well, if a game had just better rules for play, we would have less draws!' Why shouldn't the chess variant community look towards draw conditions of a very draw-prone game, and effectively evaluate it? If people don't want to do this (find it too complicated), then how about you have 3 judges that treat each game like a round, and they subjectively award points based on their experience for who won? At the end of the multi-game match, the player with the most points wins. Count a checkmate as 10 points and so on, or even 20.