Single Comment

First move advantage in Western Chess - why does it exist?[Subject Thread] [Add Response]

Joe Joyce wrote on Mon, Aug 13, 2012 08:14 PM UTC:

To continue with the race metaphor, I see the race as a 1 step advantage,
but in FIDE, it's a giant step, and in Chief, or 1-Square, it's 1 foot
stepped forward [or 4, in the case of Chief] on that multi-legged insect,
and the race is 1000 body lengths. It's lost in the noise of all those
feet going all that distance. Maybe in 1-Square, it's 1 body length, but
no more. Again, a very weak signal. I'd love to test it. If I can find
someone who can help me set it up and run games, I'll do so. Can FairyMax
be modified to play Chief? 

HG, you are quite right that I did not mention promotion or the lack
thereof, as a difference between FIDE and Chief, and I should, but I would
put it in the category of "no effect", working on the naive belief that
the "pawns" are already promoted to commoners, which have an interdiction
capacity. Not believing you would say something like that without good
reason, I thought about it for a while. I believe that you are likely right
in saying pawn promotion is one of the mechanisms for white's ad. It is
testable. Are there statistics on ... okay, found this: h t t p : / /
chess.stackexchange.com/questions/420/pawn-to-queen-probabilities-chart

"I have some partial statistics for the question, from the Million Base
1.74 database, a collection of 1742057 games. 77218 of these games (4.4%)
feature at least one promotion.

I counted 49970 promotions for white (54% of all promotions) and 42519 for
black (46%). Here are the destination square statistics ..."

However, we are told here: h t t p : / /
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotion_%28chess%29

"The percentage of games involving promotions can be misleading because
often a player resigns when he sees that he cannot stop his opponent from
promoting a pawn. In the 2006 ChessBase database of 3,200,000 games (many
grandmaster- and master-level), about 1.5 percent of the games contain a
promotion..."

And there I got stuck. I didn't find any stats on reasons why games were
resigned. The most interesting number I saw was the white-black promo ratio
of 54-46, the numbers I've been using for total points scores. But this is
already long and I've got a few things to do. I'll argue the points
later, and thanks for the new perspective.