Well, it is not reverisble in the sense that you can ever get your castling rights back.
The point here is that it is more or less coincidental that captures and Pawn pushes are both irreversible and signs of progress towards a decision. It is really the latter that is reason to reset the ply counter. Castling is not really progress.
And neither is a king move or rook move that loses the (or a) right to castle. (Logically such moves should also reset the 50-move counter if castling did.)
Do this count for vertical castling - aka promote pawn to rook on e8 (e1 for black)
kbhearn wrote:There's very few cases where it's important that a pawn push resets the 50 move counter though (at least in human play - in computer play it gives them plenty of time to find the win that they don't know how to progress). And furthermore there's cursed wins that show the 50 move rule isn't designed to not alter the game. They flirted with the idea of removing/altering the 50 move rule so that theoretical wins could be demonstrated but ultimately kept it so it's just a practical decision to limit how long one may torture the opponent without bringing the game demonstrably closer to the end (even at the cost of sometimes turning wins into draws).
In the case of your oversized shogi game where i assume like regular shogi captures leads to drops and therefore are not bringing the game closer to an end, i'm not sure a 'no progress' rule makes sense at all even. You may have to rely on the honor of the players to declare when there's just no more game to be played.
I don't think "cursed" wins are related to the 50 move rule and why it was added. It was an attempt (which worked) to get rid of games that simply last too long and which make a tournament director's (and player's) life miserable. I doubt you'd find any "I wonder if it should be 50 or 60, since 60 might give more winning chances?" It was more of a "if you can't make some concrete progress by capturing something or moving a pawn closer to promotion, it's drawish."
kbhearn wrote:There's very few cases where it's important that a pawn push resets the 50 move counter though (at least in human play - in computer play it gives them plenty of time to find the win that they don't know how to progress). And furthermore there's cursed wins that show the 50 move rule isn't designed to not alter the game. They flirted with the idea of removing/altering the 50 move rule so that theoretical wins could be demonstrated but ultimately kept it so it's just a practical decision to limit how long one may torture the opponent without bringing the game demonstrably closer to the end (even at the cost of sometimes turning wins into draws).
In the case of your oversized shogi game where i assume like regular shogi captures leads to drops and therefore are not bringing the game closer to an end, i'm not sure a 'no progress' rule makes sense at all even. You may have to rely on the honor of the players to declare when there's just no more game to be played.
I don't think "cursed" wins are related to the 50 move rule and why it was added. It was an attempt (which worked) to get rid of games that simply last too long and which make a tournament director's (and player's) life miserable. I doubt you'd find any "I wonder if it should be 50 or 60, since 60 might give more winning chances?" It was more of a "if you can't make some concrete progress by capturing something or moving a pawn closer to promotion, it's drawish."
We can probably all agree that the rule exists to set an upper limit to the players' suffering. But originally the number 50 was probably assumed to be high enough that any winning position with good play could be won within that number of moves. Because, when that turned out not to be the case, exceptions to the rule were introduced.
As the number of long endgame mates found by computers increased, FIDE realised that (1) the number of exceptions was getting out of hand and (2) the practical effect of those exceptions on the ability of humans to convert such positions was marginal. So FIDE took the right decision, abolished all exceptions and accepted that the 50-move rule effectively turns certain won positions into drawn ("cursed win") positions.
