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Since time immemorial, some people have suggested that stalemate be declared a loss for the player who is unable to move. This proposal is sometimes called "abolishing the stalemate rule" although I prefer calling it "abolishing the checkmate rule" (the idea is to declare that the game ends when the king is captured, and that it is legal to move into check—although this way of phrasing the rule change means that a "true" stalemate, where a player has no legal moves even if moving into check is legal, remains a draw).

This rule change has some obvious effects on endgame theory. What I'm wondering is whether anyone has created tablebases for this variant of chess, to investigate more thoroughly how much endgame theory would be changed. For example, does the overall draw rate of KRP vs KR, or KQP vs KQ, change noticeably?

Timothy Chow
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  • I wonder how the game would be affected if being forced to move into check were a win for the person thus forced, on the basis that forcing an opponent to move into check is considered so grossly unsportsmanlike as to constitute forfeit? – supercat Dec 11 '18 at 18:31
  • @supercat : This sounds like an interesting "fairy chess rule" that chess problemists might be able to do something with. – Timothy Chow Jan 04 '19 at 19:49
  • One could certainly construct problems where the change would be relevant. My curiosity was about whether the change would ever affect non-contrived scenarios, since the only time it would really matter would be if forcing one's opponent to move into check (which is currently a draw) were the only non-losing move. – supercat Jan 04 '19 at 20:23

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What I'm wondering is whether anyone has created tablebases for this variant of chess,

Interesting proposal, but nobody has done the works to my knowledge. If you would like to participate, you may modify source code of https://github.com/syzygy1/tb.

SmallChess
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