I mean since we’re probably still far from perfect play it’s really not that game was arbitrarily awarded to white, it’s that black made enough mistakes for white to win right?
I do personally prefer to hear that someone won rather than
but it’s fine to disagree on this though. I can possibly understand the idea of “they drew because they were equally matched”, unless of course it’s “they drew because they didn’t want to take a risk given how much money is on the line”.
Edit: Of course one could feel the same ways about games like soccer. It can be a bit disappointing to watch a game that ends up 0-0 after 90 minutes, especially if both teams didn’t really get any good chances. Maybe they were both just equally good and I guess that works ok-ish in a league format.
I agree that in chess, there are now probably “too many” draws at the very top level (above 50% in general among grandmasters! 50%! MOST games among grandmasters are draws!). In many other sports it is more like 25%.
I doubt that would be a serious problem in go given its much more granular score, so that even a “silly one point mistake” turns a drawn position into a loss (unlike chess where you might have a whole extra bishop at the end, yet it is a draw), so there should be much fewer ties. Still, it is so incredibly convenient for many tournaments formats and classification games to avoid draws
while overall pro win as white same as black with 7.5 komi,
looked at recent games of Ke Jie only:
winrate as white 85%
winrate as black 66%
well, when 2 TOP Go players fight, it just should be like this:
They should play 2 games (with change of color) and only then winner decided
1-1?
another 2 games
…
so perfect komi not needed for fair result
If they are planning for multiple games, then playing a fixed length series (with alternation of colors) is more common, I think.
Historically, alternating between black and white would be used to balance out the unfairness of games without komi, and if one player started winning too much, then the other would be beaten down by switching to a softer form of handicap where the weaker player plays black more often.
I think that draw margin is tightly linked to (winning) score granularity in relation to common score ranges.
I don’t know much about soccer, but I think scores of 1 or 2 are common at the highest levels. So the draw margin may be expressed as ~1/1.5 = 67%.
In chess, both players start out with about 40 points of material (besides the king). To win, you usually need a (potential) material advantage of at least 5 points(a rook) in the endgame, otherwise you’re lacking material to mate. So the draw margin may be expressed as ~ 4/40 = 10%.
In a game of go (territory scoring), stronger players tend to make about 70 points (order of magitude similar to a basketball game or a tennis match?).
With integer komi the draw margin would be more or less the granularity ~ 1/70 = 1.4%.
I was more trying to arrive at some estimate for an “intrinsic” draw margin of a game, loosely derived from basic mechanics of the game.
In practice you would also need to account for how evenly matched opponents are (limiting the score range to use, as the typical score difference between these players).
When both chess players are rated 2700 Elo (maybe the 50% that you stated?), you’ll probably get more draws than when both chess players are rated 1700 Elo, because the score difference between the players tends to be smaller between high level players.
That 25% draws for soccer I can find for the Premier League. I don’t know how big the Elo gap is between the top teams and the bottom teams in the Premier League.
Argentina vs Brazil historical matches also has around 25% draws for example. Argentina vs Germany is closer to 20% draws. I doubt soccer has 50% draws even between evenly matched opponents.
Chess is a completely different game and the margin of draw is much, much higher than it could ever be in Go. For example, if in chess you win a piece during the middlegame, that isn’t enough to win the game if you reach an endgame with King + knight or bishop versus just a king, with no pawns.
Actually, King + two knights isn’t enough to force a win against a king if there are no pawns.
But chess tournaments have lived with this for over 150 years, and most all-play-all or Swiss tournaments still produce a clear winner. Draws are really not a problem, except in knockout tournaments which suck anyway because they can’t give a sensible result for 2nd or 3rd places.
