English Chess Forum

In another place I posed the following question :

Quiz question : Some light relief for a dreary October weekend : Who was responsible for introducing into English chess the notion that stalemate was a type of draw ?

John Upham wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 20, 2019 8:01 pm

In another place I posed the following question :

Quiz question : Some light relief for a dreary October weekend : Who was responsible for introducing into English chess the notion that stalemate was a type of draw ?

To name an individual responsible for English chess adopting the rule that stalemate is a draw could require much research into what was the usual practice in the country prior to Philidor.

The short answer to your question is Jacob Sarratt.

I feel confident in stating that Philidor's rule that stalemate was a win for the player who was stalemated was rejected by the London Chess Club when it was founded in 1807.
The question was discussed and the draw justified by Sarratt in his 1808 Treatise, volume 1, rule 24 on page 29: "If the King be stale-mate, the game is a drawn game." Sarratt discussed the previous practice at Parsloe's and said that in Turkey the player who stalemated the opponent won the game.

Sarratt's view gained acceptance but not immediately as the laws of the Manchester club a decade later still defended the Philidor rule.

Indeed.

I picked this up from reading the entry for Jacob Henry Sarratt in Hooper and Whyld.

Once on NZ's version of Mastermind, doing the history of chess, I got a question on this very subject - I think it was something like "in England prior to 1807, what was the result of a stalemate?". Scored the point all right. My source for the knowledge was probably P W Sergeant's A Century Of British Chess.