3 ms·

> As it stands, the standard chess initial position gives white a slight edge, with white usually winning around 55% of game points Could this be explained bec

• dmurray 4y ago
  The conventional wisdom is the opposite - study of this position has led to more draws and better performance by black. It's not really borne out by the statistics here: White's advantage has slipped to 52-53% (can't see an overall figure for this but you can eyeball the centroid of the graph under "Past vs Future performances"). On the other hand the "draw death of chess" isn't really a thing at blitz games between 1800s. Perhaps 5% of games are drawn, compared to 80% of elite level classical games. So this is not a good data set to study this effect. It's still interesting for some of its other investigations, though, eg looking for whether some variations increase Whites advantage.
• oli5679 4y ago
  I would summarise the finding of this analysis as: “Given current skill levels, and current levels of preparation, human players have very small differences in win rates for different 960 positions” The general finding of computer chess is that draw rates asymptote to 100% as computer skill increases, unless you force them to play specific imbalanced starting positions. Intermediate questions are hard to evaluate. If we made chess starting position always variation 27, how often would well prepared grandmasters win/lose?