Draw by mutual agreement

A chess game can be drawn by both players agreeing to it, called a draw by mutual agreement. A player may offer a draw to his opponent at any stage of a game; if the opponent accepts, the game is a draw. The relevant portion of the FIDE laws of chess is article 9.1.

This article states that a draw should be offered after making the move and before pressing the clock. Draws made at any time are valid, however. If a player makes a draw offer before making their move, the opponent can ask them to make their move before deciding. Once made, a draw offer cannot be retracted, and is valid until rejected. A draw may be rejected either verbally or by making a move (thus the offer is no longer valid if the opponent makes a move). The actual offer of a draw may be made by asking directly "Would you like a draw?" or similar, but players frequently agree to draws by merely nodding their heads.

Although draws may be offered at any time, those not made as outlined in article 9.1 run the risk of falling under article 12.5 which states: "It is forbidden to distract or annoy the opponent in any manner whatsoever. This includes unreasonable claims or offers of a draw." This rule is applied with the arbiter's discretion: a player loudly offering a draw while his opponent is thinking may well suffer a time penalty or even forfeit the game, but it is unlikely that a player would be penalized for, say, offering a draw in a lifeless position when it is not their turn to move.

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There are certain behavioural norms relating to draw offers not codified in the FIDE laws of chess, but widely observed. For example, many consider it bad manners for a player who has offered a draw once to do so again before their opponent has himself or herself offered a draw. Such repeated offers of a draw have also sometimes been considered distracting enough to warrant the arbiter taking action under article 12.5.

Of course, it is not unethical or illegal to offer a draw even in a clearly lost position. Such an offer can be a useful psychological trick. The position in the diagram on the right arose in Samuel Reshevsky - Mastichiadis, Dubrovnik 1950. Reshevsky played 1. Nd2?, and saw at once that it loses immediately to 1... Nxf2 (see algebraic chess notation). Thinking quickly, he offered his opponent a draw, who was busy writing down the move in his scoresheet. Mastichiadis, a minor master, was so happy to get half a point against his illustrious opponent that he did not pause to examine the position before accepting the offer.

Discouragement of draws by agreement

Although many games logically end in a draw after a hard-fought battle between the players, there have been attempts throughout history to discourage or completely disallow draws. In many World Championship matches, draws have not counted, the winner instead being the first player to win a particular number of games (this rule was most recently dropped after the 1984 match between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov was abandoned without result after 48 games with neither player winning the required six). Similarly, in the very first international round-robin tournament in London in 1862, drawn games had to be replayed until there was a decisive result.

More recently, there has been concern in some quarters about agreed draws in positions which are very unclear and in which either player could still play for a win. This may be for a number of reasons: in the last round of a tournament, for example, two players who are tying for the lead may agree a quick draw in order to guarantee a share of first place; one of the players may be short of time and so agree a draw to avoid losing on time or blundering in time trouble; or the players may simply not be in the mood to fight for a win, and so take a draw to effectively have a day off.

Because such quick draws are widely considered unsatisfactory both for spectators (who may only see half-an-hour of play with nothing very interesting happening) and sponsors (who suffer from decreased interest in the media), various measures have been adopted over the years to discourage players from agreeing draws. For example, a small number of tournaments in the past have adopted an alternative scoring system, whereby a win is worth three points, while a draw is worth only one (a recent tournament using such a system was Lippstadt 2003). Similarly, there have been proposals that certain kinds of draw should be worth more points than others - for example, awarding only half a point for an agreed draw, but three quarters of a point for a side delivering stalemate (one quarter of a point going to the side who is stalemated). These proposals have never been widely adopted.

The 2003 Generation Chess International Tournament in New York City had a rule that draws could not be agreed before move 50 (draws by other means, such as three-fold repetition or stalemate, were permissible at any stage). Players agreeing to premature draws were to be fined 10% of their appearance fee and 10% of any prize money won. In a similar vein, the tournament organiser Luis Rentero (best known for organising the very strong tournaments in Linares) has sometimes enforced a rule whereby draws cannot be agreed before move 30.

The respected chess trainer Mark Dvoretsky, writing in a column for the Chess Cafe website, suggested that agreed draws should not be allowed at all, pointing out that such an agreement cannot be reached in other sports such as boxing. Although some have claimed that outlawing agreed draws entirely requires players to carry on playing in "dead" positions (where no side can reasonably play for a win), Dvoretsky says that this is a small problem and that the effort required to play out these positions until a draw can be claimed by repetition or lack of material, for example, is minimal. He also suggests that draw offers could be allowed if sent through an arbiter - if the arbiter agrees that a position is a dead draw, he will pass the draw offer on to the opponent who may either accept or decline it as usual; if the arbiter believes there is still something to play for in the position, the draw offer is not permitted. The very strong Sofia 2005 tournament is planned to employ such a rule.

There is no indication that any of these proposals will be adopted on a widespead basis, and it seems likely that except in specific tournaments expressly forbidding them, draw offers will continue to be allowed at any stage of the game.

External links

• FIDE laws of chess (http://www.fide.com/official/handbook.asp?level=EE101)
• Chess Cafe archive page (http://www.chesscafe.com/archives/archives.htm) (includes a downloadable .pdf file of Dvoretsky's article "Draw?")