(Sorry about mistyping: it is about Pool draughts)!

Unlike in Russian and Brazilian draughts, Pool draughts has one little difference in treating "3 kings vs. 1 king" endgame.
Currently under Pool draughts rules there is a statement:

(Quote)

If a player has three kings (or more) against one single enemy king (no men left on the board), the game is drawn after 15 moves. In other words: if the player with three kings or more does not win within 16 moves, the game is considered a draw.

(End of quote)

According to Pool draughts rules, if the strongest side has 3 kings and at least one of them controls long diagonal, while weakest side has only one king, the strongest side must capture king at least on 13th move!

I know that some Russian and Brazilian draughts players hate this rule difference, because majority of them are used to apply only one winning technique, while Spanish, Portugal and Pool draughts players use 3 (!) different techniques, and in this regard, Poool draughts is more friendly than Spanish or Portugal draughts where only 12 (!!!) moves are allowed in same type of endgame.

Thanks for the message with some added context.

To get this clear, for 3 kings vs 1 king (and the side with 3 kings controls the long diagonal) the following number of moves are allowed to make a capture:

15: Russian, Brazilian
13: Pool
12: Spanish, Portuguese

Is this correct? Do you have a source for the number in Pool?

@statmatt
Yes, you understand my message correctly. I decided to illustrate that 13 moves rule is not a contemporary innovation in Pool draughts, but it was known and observed many years ago.
Here is a quote from http://poolcheckers.com/books/APC/Black%20and%20Waters%20Book_1_1947.pdf , p. 42.

13-count rule
Rule 31 - "3-kings-against-1": The lone king must be caught before the long king counts thirteen (13), otherwise the game is declared a draw. The first count starts with the first move of the lone king. Each move lead by the lone king counts as one move, "jump" counting as one move. This rule is used only when there are only four pieces on the board, all pieces kings.

1

@kalnap
Thanks, could you provide a link to the current official Pool Draughts rules which backs up the 13 moves claim? The 1947 link is interesting, but is not the current source of rules.

For clarity I'm asking where do you draw this information from:
> According to Pool draughts rules, if the strongest side has 3 kings and at least one of them controls long diagonal, while weakest side has only one king, the strongest side must capture king at least on 13th move!

t was very hard to find a compilation of all Pool draughts rules in one site. However I had success: Pool draughts is very popular variant in Africa, and there are some national associations and federations.
"Association of Draughts in Malawi" is enough authoritative institution as for proclaiming rules, and at their home page they had made same statement on rule:

admamalawi.weebly.com/game-rules.html

(..)
When one player has three kings and the other player has one king (and no other pieces), the player with the superior force must win before the player with the lone king can count to 13. In connection with this it must be realized that each jump counts as a move (except for a sliding jump which counts as one move).
(..)

I hope that this quote is enough authoritative, yet if you would like to obtain written confirmation from some authority, please, try to contact Jake Kacher who is running many Facebook groups for draughts players, including Pool draughts. I am sure he will confirm that this rule is applied in local and international competitions.

Thanks for attempting to dig out sources for this.

For the moment we are going to leave it as 15 moves on Pool, as this number has been specifically requested by the IDF (idf64.org) who have run tournaments on PlayStrategy in the past and it was upon their request that we added the Pool variant.

I guess they fall into the camp of wanting a consistent rule across Russian/Brazilian/Pool.

Whilst I'm happy to believe that exclusively Pool rules talk about 13 moves, I don't see a consistent view point on whether this rule only comes into effect with a certain player (strong or weak) on the long diagonal.

Similarly Pool draughts rules say that Black moves first. This is in contrast to Russian/Brazilian and indeed all the current Draughts variants on PlayStrategy have White move first. Would you expect Black to move first in Pool Draughts? The IDF asked for White to move first.

11

@Statmatt It is by efforts of Jake Kacher that rules of Pool draughts are unified worldwide. Now only in some very conservative USA communities black (or red) moves first in Pool draughts, however, in all other countries white makes first move. Same goes for notation: numeric notation was used in USA, while in Germany and in some other Pool draughts countries the alphanumeric notation was used in publications, yet now all tournament games are recorded only in alphanumeric notation. The reason behind it is that Pool draughts is 90% compatible with Russian draughts and Brazilian draughts, and African players are learning from Russian and Brazilian training manuals where alphanumeric notation is kept.
As well, that unification was important because of board orientation. Pool draughts is very popular also in Jamaica (and even Usain Bolt plays draughts, btw.), however, the only difference is board orientation: like Italian and Spanish players, Jamaicans prefer to have single corner at right hand (so, in chessboard, it would be h1 instead of a1 for white). Yet, because alphanumeric notation is kept, Jamaican draughts players treat that single corner as a1.
As well, let me suggest one feature which would attract more draughts players from Western Africa and Jamaica. It would be good to allow draughts board orientation preference: single corner (a1 on 8x8 board, square 46 on 10x10 board) on left or right. Many Western Africa draughts players are talented on 10x10 board, they play local variant under Pool draughts rules (i.e., without maximum capturing rule), but for them it is not the obstacle for being competitive on International draughts. Many of them complain that they can't play as quickly as they could, if native board preference with single corner at right hand would be allowed.
Because IDF is largely governed by Russian players, 13 moves rule would cause some issues for some of them, but I see no reason to allow 2 excessive moves in International competitions. You had seen the statement of "Association of Draughts in Malawi" regarding this rule, and we have to believe that African players apply it in intercontinental tournaments, and they have no desire for excessive moves under pretext of higher compatibility with Russian and Brazilian players.
If one claims to be a master in draughts, he or she must know all 3 techniques for handling 3 kings vs. 1 king endgame (Montero triangle, Gonyayev line formation, "rooster" or "wizard staff" formation), but not to go for Montero triangle automatically which in some positions requires extra 3 moves. I say this, because it is much harder to get master title in draughts than in chess, and these are not rare cases when master title in draughts is earned after 20 years of active play, and these are not rare cases where less titled players (candidate masters) handle endgames better than masters do.

@kalnap Thanks for your research and passion for this issue. I'm sorry to say that for the time being Pool draughts will remain inline with IDF rules of 15 moves for a draw in the 3 kings vs 1 king scenario.

We're not debating that many Pool draughts communities play to the 13 moves rule. Nor that it is not uncommon, or requires more skill to execute a quicker path to victory.

It is strange to me that there is a struggle to find official rules for Pool that are governed Internationally and unify the rules as you imply. I also find it odd that the Malawian website that you reference for the 13 moves rule also states that Black is the start player, yet you discount that rule. Why should we ignore that part, but take the 13 move rule from this source? If there was a source on an International site that gave the collection of rules as you state/desire, then I'd like to see it.

With the release of Spanish and American/English, updates have been made to the co-ordinates system, so that players can have alphanumeric (algebraic) or numeric displayed as they desire for 8x8 draughts. We did look into the possibility of having the dark square in the bottom right corner (for example this would make Spanish draughts become Portuguese draughts). Unfortunately this was judged to be a non-trivial task due to all the code that assumes the layout as given for all our Draughts variants. As such, this would take a significantly more effort than we believe its worth at the moment, and so whilst we would like to be able to offer this option, it isn't top of our priorities.

We hope you are excited by the introduction of Spanish and American/English draughts to PlayStrategy.

The formalization of checkers variants rules depend very much on the existence of official tournament, federations, confederations, etc.

I would say:

Strongly formalized: International Draughts, Russian Shashki, Italian Dama, Portuguese Damas
Formalized: Spanish Damas, Brasilian Dama, Frisian Dambun, Turkish Dama
Not fully formalized: Pool Checkers, Malaysian Checkers, Canadian Checkers, Armenian Checkers, Thai Checkers

For the not fully formalized, usually the "accessory" rules (position of board, number of moves for draw, notation) are debatable.

11