Losing Chess

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Losing Chess, (Antichess, Giveaway Chess, Suicide Chess, Killer Chess, LC)
a chess variant in which the objective of each player is to have no moves, that is to lose all of his pieces or be stalemated. There are variations called LC1, LC2, LC3 and LC4, in the 'International' ruleset LC1, capturing is compulsory, the King is an ordinary piece to which a Pawn can promote, and there is no castling, check and checkmate. In the FICS version LC2, a stalemate means that the side with least pieces wins ¹.

Contents

Solving

Since late 2011 Mark Watkins worked on his long-term goal to weakly solve the game of Losing Chess, presumably by showing that 1. e3 wins for White. As of summer 2014 ², leaving b6 and c5 as the remaining Black responses ³, all other responses to 1.e3 are indeed White wins, along with earlier work done by Ben Nye and others, as demonstrated by Proof-Number Search combined with Endgame Tablebases. On February 02, 2015, 1. e3 c5 was announced solved, on October 10, 2016, 1. e3 b6, proving 1.e3 wins ⁴.

Engines

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Publications

John Beasley (2001). Computer Discoveries in Losing Chess. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2
Sacha Droste, Johannes Fürnkranz (2008). Learning of Piece Values for Chess Variants. Technical Report TUD–KE–2008-07, Knowledge Engineering Group, TU Darmstadt, pdf
Sacha Droste, Johannes Fürnkranz (2008). Learning the Piece Values for three Chess Variants. ICGA Journal, Vol. 31, No. 4
Mark Watkins (2012). A status report on Losing Chess. pdf
Mark Watkins (2014). Solved Openings in Losing Chess. ICGA Journal, Vol. 37, No. 2, preprint as pdf
Mark Watkins (2017). Losing Chess: 1. e3 Wins for White. ICGA Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2