News You Can Bruise for 2009 June 1

At Kevan's suggestion I changed Dada Chess to keep track of how the games ended. I was tired of how slowly the numbers were ticking up, so over the weekend I ran several thousand games of chess on my PVR. Here are the statistics as of this writing. This is how chess games turn out when both players play randomly.

• White checkmates: 449 (7.8%)
• Black checkmates: 469 (8.1%)
• Stalemate: 410 (7.1%)
• Draw: 4432 (76.6%)
• White resigns: 14 (0.2%)
• Black resigns: 13 (0.2%)
• Total: 5787

To avoid arbitrarily long games, Dada Chess forces resignation semi-randomly when the number of moves exceeds 500. Pretty much all of those games are destined to be draws. So 4459 draws (77.1%) total. About 16% of games have a winner, and there's no advantage to moving first.