Single Comment

Wouldn't the argument that white's advantage is due to pawn promotion
actually just boil down to my argument one step removed? Why does white
promote that much more often that black? Because white moves first...?
Still no mechanism. My argument is that the mechanism is the "infinite"
ranges on a very small board with irreversibility built into the move
structure accounts for the white win percentage, even if white's wins are
70% determined by the effects of pawn promotion. Why wouldn't/doesn't
black get exactly the same benefits from promotion as white, and thereby
block white from getting an advantage? Mobility. That's what makes the
average step so big that black cannot even out the race over the short
course. 

The arguments presented to me seem to amount to saying that the average
step is large, and tends to put most of its length into moving white toward
the goal of winning, at a 4:3 ratio when draws are dropped. The ratio could
be 5:4, but isn't likely to be as high as 3:2. I see the individual steps
more as a kind of semi-random walk in Warlord, where one or even several,
do not necessarily advance the player toward the goal in any meaningful
way. But the steps are never large with respect to board size, where in
FIDE, the available steps become larger on average over the course of the
game. Certainly, it is the case that in most FIDE games there comes a time
when the scope of the pieces is not limited to 3 or less squares in any
direction, thanks to piece densities. That nver occurs in the much larger
Warlord games.