I don’t like it because you can get some starting position that’s not balanced, or that one of the players has memorized the openings for. So it feels much more luck based than regular chess, whereas luck is pretty much the antithesis of what chess is all about.
Luck is what makes it interesting for spectators though. :). Just like with other sports -- a lot of it is skill but there is always some luck involved.
It’s still annoying if the starting position is one that only one of the players is deeply familiar with. Too much luck factor. They should go the shogi route and get rid of draws if they want to improve chess so much.
I’ve thought about this quite a bit. I don’t think this possible. Draws happen when two players are very closely matched that the difference in their play is not large enough to lead to a definite outcome. Currently in chess, 2800 like Magnus would draw say 70% of the time against a 2600 and win the rest (making up numbers here). The only way to solve this problem, is if the game magnifies differences in capability and enables a certain side to win. Making a game that does this, is probably very hard and would not look anything like chess.
Any other solution would face the same issue that chess faces now. For example let us say, we imbalance the sides a bit more so that white has a more definitive advantage. That just means that players will alternate winning and you’ll have to play a lot of games before anything definitive happens. In a technical sense there may not be draws, but if it just alternates 1-0, 0-1 and so on, is it better than 0.5-0.5 and so?
Shogi allows early momentum to snowball (since a captured piece is your piece). This means white has a much more definitive advantage in Shogi as white has the tempo, so I don’t think Shogi will fix anything, it will just cause see-saws. In fact I think fixing this chess issue, is far harder than it looks, and may require coordination to move all chess players to a new tactical game that magnifies differences in playing capability far more than chess which already magnifies it quite a bit.
