Draw

Home * Chess * Draw



Draw, the outcome of a chess game when it appears that neither side will win. Draws are codified by various rules of chess including stalemate, threefold repetition, and the fifty-move rule. A draw also occurs when neither player has sufficient material to checkmate the opponent or when no sequence of legal moves can lead to checkmate.

Players may further agree to a draw, the side to move may not only claim, but offer a draw, the other side may accept or decline - in computer chess, conform to a protocol and considering game stage, late endgame material configuration, score history and forecast. In official over the board computer chess tournaments such as the World Computer Chess Championship, operator draw agreements require confirmation by the tournament director or arbiter.

=Recognizing Draws= The primary purpose to recognize draws is to direct the chess program to produce drawing moves if alternatives are likely losing, or to avoid draws if ahead and alternative moves most likely win as reflected by the score of the minimax search. =Draw Score= Usually, assuming symmetric evaluation and negamaxed values, positive scores indicate the side to move is ahead, and negative if behind, which defines the value of zero as a natural draw score. However, a score of zero does not necessarily reflect a draw score, but a score of a equal or balanced position. Same is true, if programs apply a contempt factor considering the relative strength of the opponent. =Cray Blitz= Cray Blitz applied a special draw heuristic, not uniformly using zero as draw score, but rather zero plus the ply distance to the root to prefer later draws rather than a draw now. Additionally, the draw score range is disjoint from evaluation scores, which then exclude values around zero by adding or subtracting appropriate offsets if either greater or equal, or less than zero.

=Draw Topics=
 * Blockage Detection
 * Contempt Factor
 * Corresponding Squares
 * Draw Evaluation
 * Draw Score
 * Fifty-move Rule
 * Insufficient Material
 * Perpetual Check
 * Repetitions
 * Stalemate
 * Wrong Color Bishop and Rook Pawn

=See also=
 * Checkmate
 * Chess Game
 * Endgame Tablebases
 * Graph History Interaction (GHI)
 * Interior Node Recognizer
 * KPK
 * Match Statistics
 * Path-Dependency
 * Pursuit
 * Rules of Chess
 * Score
 * Transposition
 * Transposition Table

=Publications=
 * David Slate (1984). Interior-node Score Bounds in a Brute-force Chess Program. ICCA Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 184-192
 * Harry Nelson, Robert Hyatt (1988). The Draw Heuristic of Cray Blitz. ICCA Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 3-9.
 * Ernst A. Heinz (1998) Efficient Interior-Node Recognition. ICCA Journal, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 156-167
 * Vladan Vučković, Đorđe Vidanović (2004). A New Approach to Draw Detection by Move Repetition in Computer Chess Programming. arXiv:cs/0406038

=Forum Posts=

1995 ...

 * 50 move rule question by Uri Blass, CCC, April 20, 1999

2000 ...

 * Shortest Stalemate by Samuel Loyd by Ed Schröder, CCC, March 02, 2001
 * "Don't trust draw score" <=Is it true? by Teerapong Tovirat, CCC, August 08, 2001
 * A new(?) technique to recognize draws by Heiner Marxen, CCC, June 01, 2002 » Perpetual Check, Corresponding Squares

2005 ...

 * Quark 2.35 draw claim bug by Igor Korshunov, Winboard Forum, March 28, 2005 » Quark
 * Draw scores by Carey, CCC, October 05, 2007 » Draw Score
 * When and how to return a draw evaluation? by Mathieu Pagé, CCC, August 26, 2008 » Repetitions

2010 ...

 * Re: question on draw evaluation by Robert Houdart, CCC, June 07, 2010
 * Wrong draw claim by Naum 4.2 ? by Matthias Gemuh, CCC, January 12, 2011 » Naum, Insufficient Material
 * Playing better moves in drawish positions (anti-0.00) by Onno Garms, CCC, March 13, 2011 » Onno
 * final drawscore testing results by Robert Hyatt, CCC, September, 13, 2011
 * Repetitions/50 moves and TT by Sergei Markoff, CCC, September 13, 2011 » Fifty-move Rule
 * Texel recipe to fix TT draws scores by Marco Costalba, CCC, June 23, 2012 » Texel
 * Draw value by Fermin Serrano, CCC, August 06, 2012
 * Draw aversion by Don Dailey, OpenChess Forum, December 16, 2012
 * Value draw by Marek Kwiatkowski, CCC, December 04, 2013

2015 ...

 * Final Report on Draw Problem in Correspondence Chess by Ciron, Rybka Forum, August 26, 2015
 * The future of chess and elo ratings by Larry Kaufman, CCC, September 20, 2015 » Match Statistics, Opening Book
 * Test positions for draw detection by Shawn Chidester, CCC, September 27, 2015 » Test-Positions
 * Syzygy and draw by repetition by Jon Dart, CCC, July 22, 2016 » Repetitions, Syzygy Bases
 * Some thoughts about draws by Pio Korinth, CCC, August 03, 2016
 * The new chess rules (5-fold repetition and 75-move draw) by Lyudmil Antonov, FishCooking, November 29, 2016 » Stockfish, Repetitions
 * Have engines updated for fide 2014 draw rules? by Norm Pollock, CCC, January 28, 2017
 * Managing draws in the tree search by Stuart Cracraft, CCC, March 26, 2017
 * Reporting a draw in UCI by Vince Sempronio, CCC, May 05, 2017 » UCI
 * Ways to avoid "Draw Death" in Computer Chess by Kai Laskos, CCC, July 25, 2017 » Match Statistics, Playing Strength
 * Draw scores in TT by Srdja Matovic, CCC, April 14, 2018 » Draw Score, Transposition Table
 * Rebel Book Draw? by John Merlino, CCC, October 03, 2018 » Opening Book
 * Are draws hard to predict? by Daniel Shawul, CCC, November 27, 2018 » Neural Networks
 * Why does stockfish randomise draw evaluations? by Vincent Tang, CCC, September 01, 2019 » Stockfish, Draw Evaluation, Draw Score, Search with Random Leaf Values

=External Links=
 * Fide Handbook - E.I.01A. Laws of Chess - Article 9: The drawn game
 * Draw (chess) from Wikipedia
 * Draw by agreement from Wikipedia
 * Grandmaster draw from Wikipedia


 * D (Dead Draw, Draw, Drawing line, Drawish, Draw odds, Drawing weapon) - Glossary of chess from Wikipedia
 * Book draw - Glossary of chess from Wikipedia
 * Draw (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * draw - Wiktionary
 * Tie (draw) from Wikipedia
 * How many points should you get for a draw? by Arno Nickel, ChessBase News, August 20, 2015

=References=

Up one Level