In my first successful attempt to evaluate playing strength of the available 10x8-capable WinBoard engines, (i.e. the first attempt that was not corrupted by hanging processes loading the CPU at the expense of the ongoing games), I conducted a round-robin at 10+0 time control. This had 10 games per pairing from 5 different opening positions, so that each engine played 70 games. (For details, see http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/TT5.html.)
True, draws are much rarer in 10x8 Chess than in normal Chess. The are more common than this tourney suggests, though: part of the low draw rate is due to the very wide spread in Elo of the participants, making about half the games a straightforward slaughter.
Sudden-death time controls are also a factor adverse to draws: drawn games tend to drag on forever, until the engine with the slightly inferior time management is left with so much less time than the opponent that it starts to blunder the draw away.
Last edited by hgm on Sun Feb 24, 2008 8:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The only good indication of the normal draw rate I have is from the following large set of self-play games of Joker80: two completely identical versions against each other, from opening positions with various pieces deleted, to create an unequal-material situation. The deleted material was chosen such to create an approximately fair battle. (Sometimes I also changed one piece for another, e.g. Q->A for one side, and A->Q for the other.)
Typical number of draws in a 432-game match is ~64, is ~15%. (These were all 40/1' games; I did not measure how the draw rate varied with time control.)
