Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 13:05:56 04/04/00
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On April 04, 2000 at 07:51:17, Laurence Chen wrote: >The solution is to revise the 50 move rule. Like any rule in chess, it has been >revised. So with the advance of tablebases, I believe that the 50 move rule >should be revised. FIDE did it once in the rule to allow special positions, >endgames, which would require more than 50 move rules. Then because some GMs >started to complain FIDE took the rule away. I find it very narrow minded of >FIDE and of people to strictly abide to 50 move rule and to not allow some >specail positions to go beyond the 50 move rule if necessary. Men makes the >rule, so why should not the rule be changed? Remember in the 13the Century, >castling was not part of the rule of the game, and the Queen did not have such >high mobility, it could only move one square, the rook also could only move to a >maximum of 5 squares. And all these rules have been changed, and it made chess >more interesting. I believe that the rule got reversed because these GMs felt >threatened by computers, and it is more of a political bureaucracy than to have >any brains and guts to accept that computers aided chess is here to stay. Let's >get out of the modern dark ages, and move forward. I'm surprised to hear this from someone who I thought tended to take the view of the strong chess player. The rule was changed back because strong chess players didn't like it. The big problem was KRB vs KR, which turns out to have an optimax of more than 50 moves. The players rebelled against the idea of playing this out further, when the odds of actually starting in one of the > 50-move positions are low. In short, the odds that you'd really "need" 50 moves are much lower than the odds that you'd get into a more normal variant of this ending and have to suffer for twice as long, resulting in degraded play in later rounds of your tournament, for no real reason. I think it makes perfect sense to keep the rule the way it is, rather than allowing for freakish cases invented by computers. Let the humans play the game in a manner that is most pleasant for them. bruce
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