Rational Chess
This post is intended to be understandable even if you have never played chess, but will probably not interest you if you don’t like games like chess.
TL,DR: The most fair version of chess would be Armageddon (if neither player can checkmate the other, black wins) with a “you cut I chose” rule for black (once black plays, the first player can decide to flip the board).
The Problem
Chess as it is played today has 2 main issues:
White has a slight advantage because they make the first move
Games tend to end in a draw (partly because the players tend to play the same safe openings and partly because it seems like the natural outcome of the game as the 2 players do less and less mistakes)
Players have created many variants in order to cope with these, but none of them rose to the same popularity as classical chess. All of these variants add rules that change the whole flow of the game. For example, this article describes a game of no castling chess (which is one of the least “invasive” variant of chess) where Gukesh lost because he played what would have been a very normal classical chess move.
This post demonstrates a variant of chess that has only decisive games, no advantage for a given player, and that should theoretically allow players to retain all the skills and intuitions they earned playing classical chess.
You cut I choose
There is already a solution for games which have a first player advantage situation: the “you cut I chose” rule. Player 1 cuts the cake and player 2 chooses which side they want to eat. In chess, that would translate to player 1 making the first move with white, and player 2 choosing whether they continue the game as black or white.
We don’t use the “you cut I chose” rule in chess tournaments. I believe it is because making the game too fair would create more draws.
Armageddon
There already exists a simple way to remove draws from chess, which is to have black win if neither player can checkmate the other. This variant is called Armageddon.
As I said before, chess tends to have a lot of draws, so Armageddon advantages black a lot.
The variant is used as a tie breaker in some fast chess tournaments, and the organizers usually try to balance it by giving an arbitrary 1 minute time advantage to white. Yikes. To be fair, they also put in place the way more sensible approach where players bid some of their time at the start of the game in order to gain the black pieces, but that adds a lot of complexity.
Conclusion
In Armageddon, there are 2 parameters (time and win condition) that are different from classical chess and we could make it only one parameter different by combining it with the “you cut I chose rule”.
In this case the second player (black) has an advantage, so the game would unfold like this: Player 1 plays with white, Player 2 plays with black, then Player 1 chooses whether to keep white or switch to black. Player 2 is incentivized to make a bad move to balance the advantage, and after that the whole game continues just like Armageddon chess.
I remain confused by why high level chess has so many draws. As I understand it, most draws are by agreement: that is, rather than playing the game out until they see that neither player is capable of winning, people will play a few dozen moves and then agree to a draw with plenty of pieces still on the board. But in any given position someone has to be favored (if only slightly), so when one player offers a draw and the other accepts, someone is making a mistake. I could understand if this was common in amateurs who might be inclined to say “Eh, this game’s in a boring state and I don’t want to play any more” but I’m baffled to see it from players who seem to be skilled win-maximizers.
Conservation of resources. It may not be worth the effort of playing out the game just to get the result one expected.
What exactly is the resource being conserved, hours of the player’s life?
Hours of mental effort.
In very important tournaments, games can be intense enough that if you play a very long game (up to 6 hours of focus) you will be tired/play more poorly the next day
I would guess that
Most draws are by agreement, but my guess is that a good chunk of these are from positions which are very drawish (in particular, often from endgame positions which are known draws).
Anyway, I agree that a bunch of draws are by agreement from a position with many pieces on the board, and it’s interesting why these exist.
I think it’s often about conserving resources as Kennaway said (mostly for other games in the same event). I think it’s occasionally about just not feeling like playing. I think it’s also reasonably commonly about effective utilities of outcomes not matching 0⁄0.5/1 for other reasons. Like, it’s easy to set up tournament situations in which a certain draw is better for a player than eg winning with probability
eg because it’s the candidates tournament and you want to qualify for the world championship match
Winning draws is such a huge advantage that I’m not sure that there can be a first move that cancels it.
In general though, “you cut I choose” always gives advantage to the choosing player. The “cutting” player can only move to reduce the advantage. However the draw rate is so great in high levels of chess that I’m not sure whether there exist first moves that cancel out the enormous advantage of winning any game that would ordinarily be a draw.
In your proposal, my initial guess is that player 1 has an advantage among top human chess players in slow time controls, because you can play such that player 2 has no way to balance the game with just one move? Like, I propose the following strategy for player 1. First, play b4 as white. Then if standard engine evaluations are to be trusted (even though they are ultimately computed wrt the wrong objective function given your change in what the utility function is in chess), the move that makes the position as bad as possible for black is g5, after which the engine gives +60 regular-chess-centipawns in favor of white. So say player 1′s policy is to always pick black, whatever second move player 2 chooses. We’ve concluded that this way, the start position will be at worst 60 regular-chess-centipawns in favor of white. My guess is that among top players, player 1 will hold the ensuing chess game to at least a draw
I think your game is probably indeed balanced as play gets worse though (so, at faster time controls and lower elo ratings).
If this is indeed an issue, you can probably fix this by just letting player 2 [2] choose the first move by white and the first response by black (you could also add in another move if this isn’t sufficient to create a balanced position or to create more opening variety), and then letting player 1 pick a side. (This is like the swap opening protocol in gomoku.) We could also add either the option or requirement for player 1 to make another move or two after and let player 2 choose. (This is like the swap2 opening protocol in gomoku, which avoids the issue that you can extensively study both sides of an opening configuration you’re going to place and so have an advantage from either side even if the position looks balanced to an engine. This might be not that much of an issue in chess if the configuration-placer only gets two moves, but it quickly becomes a huge problem if you allow the configuration-placer more moves.)
on another topic: If you want to preserve the relevance of skills and intuitions from regular chess, one issue with these proposals is that they completely upend opening theory. Like, people will be playing completely different openings. Basic opening principles probably largely survive, though even that isn’t so obvious because white is now much less happy with a regular-chess-draw, and that probably reverberates to some impact on more sophisticated aspects of opening principles.
another point for fun: My guess is that this rule change does not call for new endgame skills/intuitions that much — like, much less than opening ones and midgame ones. One could perhaps find this surprising, because the different win condition is “most closely seen” in the endgame. I think what’s going on here is this. The rule change probably meaningfully changes the distribution of endgame “start positions” reached, but I’m guessing that almost all the “endgame start positions” reached are already familiar to good chess players (it’s more like a shifted distribution on the same support than a distribution supported on new weird positions). Furthermore, usually, from an “endgame start position”, when two top players are facing each other, only at most two of the three usual chess outcomes (a win for white, a draw, a win for black) are available (like, would be assigned
one last point for fun: Technically, perfect play in your game (after the opening procedure) is compatible with perfect play in usual chess — from the perspective of optimal play, these two games are kinda the same. Like, if you win all the winning positions and draw all the drawing positions, you’re playing optimally in both games at once. Despite this, good human play in your game is quite different from good human play in usual chess (especially among top players). It’s a nice example of the phenomenon that the cardinalization of the assignment of value to outcomes matters a lot in practice even in games of perfect information (where technically only the ranking of outcomes matters for determining perfect play).
According to code written by ChatGPT-5.2 which I haven’t checked, b4 is the min-over-white-moves max-over-black-moves white standard engine evaluation first move, but I think it used a kinda bad engine so there might be something better. (I manually checked in the lichess evaluator that there isn’t a worse response to 1. b4 than g5 though.)
Really we should call this “player 1” in this proposal in isolation, but I’ll say “player 2″ to stick with the property that player 1 gets to choose a side from your proposal.
I didn’t go into it in the post but having the players play more aggressively is indeed something I intended. I believe chess looks way more solved than it really is for humans because players are afraid of unfamiliar positions. You really don’t need chess 960 to create original positions, just to change cardinal utility. I did not know this word before your comment and I thank you for introducing it to me, changing the cardinal utility while affecting perfect play as little as possible was really the thing I was trying to say, but I lacked the vocabulary
Why can’t player 1 just make a really bad move, then switch with player 2 no matter what he plays? That seems like it would give player 1 (who then becomes player 2) a huge advantage.
It’s a problem with the proposed rules but to nitpick, I’m not sure player 1 would always switch. The natural counterplay would be for player 2, seeing the really bad move, to make his own really bad move in an attempt to equalize their positions.
If I had to guess, black is favored in Armageddon after both players play the worst possible turn 1s, but it’s not obvious to me.
oh I just hadn’t thought of that! I am very embarrassed, this seems like a very unfair strategy indeed.
That explains why I couldn’t find any example of “you cut I choose” where the first player was choosing. Anything I can think of to counter this strategy would just make the game more complicated
Does this work?
Player 1 makes a move for White.
Player 2 has option to switch colors
Black player makes a move
White player has option to switch colors
Play continues with White’s 2nd move as normal Armageddon.
Or more simply:
Player 1 makes a move for White.
Player 2 has the option to switch colors.
Play continues with Reversed Armageddon, where White wins ties.
I think this would work so long as Player 1 is capable of making a bad enough first move to cancel out White’s huge advantage from both going first and winning draws. (And ideally there would be more than one move that’s about that bad, so that the opening doesn’t always start the same way.)
The usual practice is to chose at random, or in a series of games to alternate who plays White. Simple, no new rules required. Why is this not the best solution?
Well, it requires playing a lot of games to be statistically balanced. Ideally the game is better to watch if you can determine who is the best player in as few games as possible.
Taking turns to play White only takes 2 games.
The OP’s suggestion is an Armageddon variant, though, so you’re guaranteed a non-draw result after 1 game. Alternating games (even Armageddon games) could leave the players tied indefinitely.
I suppose you could wait to start the timer until after Player 1 chooses. The first move and response plus choosing shouldn’t take very long since it can probably be fully precomputed.