Source unknown, some sites assign it to Oppressive Silence comics by Ethan Vincent. But that website in the corner is shady
I don’t get it
Queen moves into a space that stops king from moving as you cannot move into a check. It’s a forced draw.
What’s the benefit to the game of this being a draw instead of an obvious loss to white?
“You didn’t win correctly.” - Chess (The original Dark Souls-themed tactical grid-based roguelike war game)
Depends.
If the goal is to just play a game with a clear winner and loser, there’s no benefit at all.
But that isn’t what chess is. It’s more like a strategy game where there are multiple outcomes that would reflect degrees of skill and thinking.
If you’re already behind, but you can pull off a stalemate, that’s hard. In some ways, it’s harder than winning in the first place. It means that you and the other player are well matched. I’ve heard serious players rattle on about difficult draws the way football (both types) fans will talk about decisive victories of their favorite team. They’ll pick the moves apart and use those moves and tactics in their own games.
I was never a serious chess player at all. I simply don’t have the willingness to study it the way you have to to be really good at it. It felt too derivative for my preferences. But I can still remember more of my close games and draws than I can my wins because it took more of the kind of gameplay I enjoy, where you’re kinda winging it and calculating based on your own way of thinking instead of relying on a body of research and theory.
Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. The folks that play high level chess are amazing, and I fully respect the work they put into grokking chess at that level. I’m just saying that isn’t fun for me, and I play board games of any type for fun and companionship, not personal improvement or a sense of competitiveness.
Which, going back, is why I can recall my draws better than my wins or losses. They were me having fun and managing to hang with smarter, better players by dint of sinking into the play of it.
But when one of those players pulls off a draw from disadvantage? That’s fucking art, it’s mastery of a complicated but finite set of possibilities.
I don’t know anything about chess but I imagine one benefit would be to give the losing player one last opportunity to avoid a loss by being strategic and give the winning player the need to still think about their moves instead of just randomly moving around since they know they will win otherwise.
In theory black could play poorly and give the queen away by placing it next to the white king, then if the white king takes the black queen it would be a draw. Why would black do such a thing? Well playing poorly also means stalemating your opponent in an obviously winning position, which also happened here.
You can argue it’s an “obvious win”, just like I could argue if I’m a piece up it’s an “obvious win” for me. But just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean the result is guaranteed to happen.
Also I guarantee you not everyone can actually checkmate a king with just a queen and king. So in fact it’s not so obvious for a super beginner.
As for the benefits of the actual mechanism itself, in some positions you can actually force a draw or stalemate where you’d either otherwise be losing, or you are unclear of your advantage. For example in one of my games I was chasing the King around with my Rook where if the king took my rook, it would be stalemate, and if they didn’t take my rook I would keep checking the king (while making sure the distance between my rook and their king is 0).
Huh? I thought having no valid moves that wouldn’t lead to the king’s death was a loss. How DO you lose then?
Have to put him in check, while also preventing him from moving into another spot that could also put him into check.
This would likely have been a stalemate anyway.
Edit: the bishop’s existence didn’t even register to me when I made this comment. More pieces are better, and yes, King and Queen are sufficient to mate. However, the fewer the pieces you have, the lower your chances of success.
How is it a draw is both black bishop and king are still playing? Queen moves back, white king moves anywhere it wants and for good sake do a proper check mate
An I over analysing?
Is this some special rule? Looks like check mate to me?
I’ve never understood why stalemate is draw.
The legitimacy was described above. The game is designed so that you can’t stop focusing even when you’re in a winning position. Players over the centuries have admired cleverness in the face of overwhelming odds. That’s what it means to turn a losing position into a draw.
For real life war analogies, think of the king escaping through a secret tunnel while his castle is under siege and all his soldiers dying.
Chess is an old game, and stalemate wasn’t always considered a draw. At other times, creating a stalemate may have been considered a win or loss or partial win, or it may have been illegal altogether. But the modern draw makes sense if you keep in mind a few things. First, the victory condition is putting the opponent’s king in checkmate (or accepting their concession). Second, exposing your king to an attack during your move is not just a blunder, it is actually an illegal move, to the point that you can’t even do it as a pass through while castling. So stalemate is a unique outcome where neither player achieves their victory condition, yet the game cannot continue, since the player who must move next has no legal moves available.
In a practical sense, stalemate offers a means of giving a player in an inferior position a means of escaping a loss by punishing the dominant player for not being able to capitalize on their lead. It helps prevent someone from being able to brute force a win by making safe moves that do little to actually progress the game, like advancing all their pawns until the game is trivial. It’s much less interesting to have the end game strategy be more about not losing one’s lead rather than extending it.
So a win requires being more than slightly ahead of an opponent. It’s worth pointing out that most high level chess games end in a draw where neither player has a sufficient lead to force a checkmate. There are other rules in modern chess that also force a draw to make sure the game is more about getting a win than just avoiding a loss. Otherwise there would be plenty of ways someone could stall forever to try to get their opponent to concede, and that’s not very interesting.
This comic is indeed by oppressive silence comics by Ethan Vincent.
He seems to have disappeared from the internet in mid-2018.
This comic titled draw seems to have been his second to last published comic.
Archived link to his website.
xcancel link to his twitter.