Hi Daniel

Regarding your first sentence, I suspect that, regrettably, for the time being it just might take me a bit too much thought/effort to enter a fully satisfactory reply (though anyone else is welcome to attempt to do that). Meanwhile, whenever you have some free time, you might look up the particular rules of chess that list all of the various possible situations that are described with words and/or diagrams, there, where a drawn result for a game of chess might conceivably happen.

To try to put my dilemma, as I perceive it (whether it is real or imagined [I apologize if it's the latter]), into perspective, I'll try to give you a (hopefully valid) analogy, namely: for those who are first learning chess, it's perhaps a bit like learning to drive. When one has become a lot more experienced at driving a car, many years later, obeying the precisely stated rules of the road becomes a bit too instinctive to recall with precision, as if to think over any single rule of the road in a sentence of English. It might be all the more so if such a person were to be asked to give a somewhat lengthy talk, about any number of the rules of the road, to students at a driving school, without some preparation (and maybe even significantly more preparation to give even some sort of an educated guess about the feasibility and/or consequences of changing perhaps just one of those rules).

Your second sentence, however, I may be able to answer a bit more easily, though I don't know if it'll be an answer that seems fully satisfactory, for those who want more decisive results in chess, most especially in elite level play. It is that there has been, at least starting some years ago (and maybe it's still in use, perhaps) a special match tiebreak condition set (though for world chess championship cycle events, only, as far as I know) where (say, due to limited time available to the playing facilities available that host such a match) a match must end in the space of just one (final) game, e.g. if a previous fast time control phase used to break a (still) tied match still did not achieve that result.

Then, the special (i.e. single game only) match tiebreak condition must be used. Somehow (I don't know if there is one particular rule always used for this) it is decided which player takes which army (i.e. White or Black) in that single game, which is called the 'Armageddon Chess' tiebreak phase (due to it being 'the final battle' - I hope Fergus, as being CVP webmaster/(editor-in-chief), will not edit out [at least part of] that standard phrase that is used as the name for it [as is still the case in chess playing circles], due to a certain word that's part of that phrase).

Anyway, a chess clock is used for the play of the game in question (notably with no increments ever added to either player's available time during play), and, as I recall, it is with the player of the White army getting 5 minutes to play the entire game, and Black getting just 4 minutes (except, if the result is a draw, Black in effect wins the game, and thus the match - otherwise, White wins the match [I don't know what happens, rules-wise, for any possible unusual cases that might ever happen]).

Personally, I think this particular special match tiebreaking method (and the name of it) is pretty crappy (e.g. I wonder if the player of the White army is to be generally, in theory, favored [over an opponent of equal chess rating playing the Black army] to become the winner of such a single game [perhaps even significantly] more than usually would be the case [that is, by the normal rules of a {5 minutes per side} speed chess game still being applied, though where a no-decision {i.e. normal drawn game stands as just that} kind of result would {naturally} still be possible], by this special format, due to White's having an extra minute on his own clock). Note, though, that I don't know if there has ever been such a high level match where this special tiebreaking method has been employed, due to its being necessary.

In any event, a fellow chess-playing master friend once gave me his own appraisal of such an 'Armageddon Chess' format by saying, 'at least it's chess' (e.g., for the sake of comparison, many years back, the winner of an important match in such a world chess championship cycle was decided completely at random, due to the match still being tied past its previously planned tiebreak stage [by the match conditions that were already set in advance, I think], and because the match was played in Monte Carlo, which [I presume {also}] has within its city limits a world famous casino, a roulette wheel was used to in effect act as the match's tiebreaking 'method', to decide which of the two players would then advance without any further delay to the next level of that year's world chess championship cycle).