Draws are getting cheaper, are 15W enough?

[Ovyron]

I suppose these were all played with normal chess rules rather than with chess960 castling, although each side looks like a 960 position in each diagram.

Apparently they didn't include castling at all (no KQkq/Gkq stuff), so it's unclear why they kept the kings between the two rooks.

Were there really "no" draws, or just not too many? Hard to imagine no draws at all.

0% draws in 34 games. Presumably there were many other positions tried out, with some being close to equal for both sides, but a single draw would make them no longer notable.

The games were between centaurs (humans assisted with engines) at 45 days starting time +2 days increment time controls. Unfortunately crazy-chess.ru seems to have wiped them out, so we all have is the legends (they could still be checked back in 2017. Players' names still exist. Google cache might have saved some of these games.)

Later on an engine-only tournament happened with 180 minutes +2 second increment time controls, the results were again...

Code: Select all

Stockfish 8.9   | *  | 11 | 11 | 11 | 33 | +9 | 69% | 1 
Stockfish 8     | 5  | *  | 10 | 11 | 26 | +2 | 54% | 2  
Strong Engine Y | 5  | 6  | *  | 9  | 20 | -4 | 42% | 3 
Strong Engine X | 5  | 5  | 7  | *  | 17 | -7 | 35% | 4

No draws... though we don't even get to know who were engines Y or X (Rybka derivatives?)...

I used the shootout feature to play out the first position with ten different engines at 2' + 1". Result: 7 out of 10 games drawn! So even this radical idea doesn't really help.

I wonder if this has something to do with time controls, or with engines's strength, but I suspected these positions weren't useful (if they were, they wouldn't be so obscure - but why nobody was able to produce a single draw back then remains a mystery...)