Are Armageddon chess games implemented fairly?

Abstract

A strategy to find fair time controls for Armageddon chess games is presented and exemplified with 2750+ ELO players. The research was divided in two stages. The first one consisted in finding a time control for Stockfish 9 so that it played with an effective strength equal to the average 2750+ ELO players of the 2017 World Blitz Chess Championship. Analysis of this stage showed that a fair time control for an Armageddon game depends on the players’ rating. In the second stage, another instance of Stockfish 9 with a different time control was paired as the black player to the engine with the time control found in the first stage as the white player. The new engine’s time control was adjusted so that the expected result of Armageddon games between these two engines would be a draw. This game generation was done because there is a very small amount of Armageddon games in order to draw statistical conclusions out of them. The resulting time controls were found to be $180\pm 35$ seconds for white and $110\pm 12.27$ seconds for black plus a $2\pm 0.39$ second increment per move, starting from move 1. Therefore, the ratio between the initial times for the black and white players is approximately 3 to 5, which is different from the normally implemented 4 to 5 ratio.