Are Armageddon chess games implemented fairly?

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Vargas-Calderón, Vladimir^{; *; **}

Affiliations: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia

Correspondence: [**] Corresponding author. E-mail: vvargasc@unal.edu.co.

Note: [*] Superconductivity and Nanotechnology Group, Departamento de Física, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia. E-mail: vvargasc@unal.edu.co.

Abstract: A strategy to find fair time controls for Armageddon chess games is presented and exemplified with 2750+ ELO players. The research was divided in two stages. The first one consisted in finding a time control for Stockfish 9 so that it played with an effective strength equal to the average 2750+ ELO players of the 2017 World Blitz Chess Championship. Analysis of this stage showed that a fair time control for an Armageddon game depends on the players’ rating. In the second stage, another instance of Stockfish 9 with a different time control was paired as the black player to the engine with the time control found in the first stage as the white player. The new engine’s time control was adjusted so that the expected result of Armageddon games between these two engines would be a draw. This game generation was done because there is a very small amount of Armageddon games in order to draw statistical conclusions out of them. The resulting time controls were found to be 180±35 seconds for white and 110±12.27 seconds for black plus a 2±0.39 second increment per move, starting from move 1. Therefore, the ratio between the initial times for the black and white players is approximately 3 to 5, which is different from the normally implemented 4 to 5 ratio.

Keywords: Armageddon, time control, fairness, chess

DOI: 10.3233/ICG-190134

Journal: ICGA Journal, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 180-190, 2019