The Everything Chess Basics Book (12 page)

With Black to move, the game ends in stalemate. Black has no legal moves available, and is not in check.

In some stalemates, one player may have an enormous advantage. He may have many pieces and pawns left while his opponent is left with a lone king. Yet, since that king has no moves, the game ends and is declared a draw.

With White to move, the game ends in stalemate. Somehow Black went terribly wrong to get this far ahead and not win.

It is a situation that may seem unfair, but that’s only if you are the one left with the large advantage. Perhaps with such a large advantage you could have found a way to herd the lone king into a corner and checkmate him. Thus, allowing a player with a lone king to escape with a stalemate is often nothing more than carelessness.

On the other hand, if you are the one with the lone king, you might see stalemate as a fantastic opportunity. There have been combinations (see Chapter 10) played where a competitor, sensing trouble, got rid of his remaining pieces in order to bring about a stalemate to end the game in a draw. These types of combinations are available to those who look for them.

So don’t disdain stalemate; use it as a weapon. After all, ½ a point is better than none.

Insufficient Mating Material

Here’s a case of a well-thought-out rule. Since nobody can produce a checkmate even if both players cooperate in the demise of one, the game is automatically called a
draw
.

Easy Cases

The simplest case is king against king. Next simplest is king and minor piece against king. These situations are automatic, because the players could play moves until the cows come home and nobody could ever produce a checkmate. Notice that positions with pawns do not qualify.

Pawns can promote, as you will learn in Chapter 5, so there is always sufficient mating material as long as a single pawn is on the board.

Not So Easy

When we get to king and minor piece against king and minor piece, however, we start getting into some trouble. A king and knight cannot checkmate another king and knight, and a king and bishop cannot checkmate another king with a same-colored bishop. But a king and bishop can checkmate a king and knight or a king with an opposite-colored bishop. And a king and knight can checkmate a king and bishop.

All these positions are rather obscure, however. Although checkmates are possible in such positions, they cannot be forced. These checkmates require a cooperative opponent. So for all practical purposes, all such positions are generally abandoned as drawn.

A king and two knights cannot force a lone king into submission. Incredible but true. It takes a rook or queen or two bishops or a bishop and a knight to force a checkmate on a lone king. Or a lonely pawn, who can promote into a rook or queen and thus create enough checkmating material.

Three-Position Repetition

This one is not always completely understood, even by very experienced players. That is because the rule is a bit dry and players have memorized it in a slightly edited form.

The Rule

This rule is actually called
Triple occurrence of position
in the
Official
Rules of Chess
. It runs:

The game is drawn upon a claim by a player on the move when
the same position is about to appear for at least the third time or
has just appeared for at least the third time, the same player being
on move each time. In both cases, the position is considered the
same if pieces of the same kind and color occupy the same squares
and if the possible moves of all the pieces are the same, including
the right to castle or to capture a pawn en passant.

Position, Not Moves

Most players think of this rule as repeating the same move three times consecutively. But you will notice that there is no mention of repeating moves or the same position occurring consecutively.

Most often this draw will come about by the players repeating moves in order, since that is the easiest way to bring about a repetition of the same position. But it is possible to throw in other moves or to repeat the same position with a different move order, so it’s a good idea to know the rule as it is stated in the rule book.

Here is an example of this triple occurrence of position draw:

White is in trouble, but the Black king is exposed. So White begins to check. The White queen moves to b8 to check. The Black king moves to g7, and the White queen moves to e5 to check again.

The Black king has to go back to the eighth rank, but he wants to avoid moving to f8, because then the White queen can move to h8 for checkmate. The Black king moves to g8. The White queen then moves to b8 for check. Note that this is the second time this position has occurred.

The Black king then moves to g7. The White queen checks at e5. The Black king escapes to g8 and the White queen again moves to b8 for check.

The intention of the triple occurrence of position draw is that the players are only wasting time if they keep coming back to the same position. The player who is trying to win must somehow come up with some sort of progress toward a checkmate, while the player who is trying to draw merely has to keep repeating the position.

You no doubt recognize this position by now. It is the third time it has occurred, and the game is therefore drawn.

Fifty-Move Rule

This rule also is intended to prevent players from wasting time by playing random moves that lead nowhere. Under the fifty-move rule, if no pawns are moved and no captures are made in fifty consecutive moves, the game is declared a draw. Fifty moves in this rule is defined as fifty moves by White and fifty moves by Black, so that is still a lot of moves.

Throughout the 1990s there was a push to expand the fifty-move rule to a seventy-five-move rule or a hundred-move rule. This was to accommodate certain positions where computer programs found ways to force checkmate that required more than fifty moves of maneuvering without moving a nonexistent pawn or making a capture. Positions such as king, rook, and bishop against king and rook are susceptible to this extension of the fifty-move rule. There is as yet no consensus on whether or not these rule changes should be made universal. Sometimes the changed rules are in effect, and other times the old fifty-move rule is in effect. A tournament director should therefore make clear which rules are in effect for his event.

In a way this is a very exciting time to be a chess player. It has been hundreds of years since the last big changes in the rules began. Today, thanks to the influence of computers, it is possible we may be seeing another set of rule changes.