How long is a piece of string?
it is the same kind of question as the possibilities are endless if you set out to try this eg. 1a3,Nc6 2 Nf3 and then move knights around for 49 moves before another pawn is moved once. then the sequence continues.
For real, ive seen 188 moves and drawn on insuficient material.
I believe the longest possible game is 5, 500 moves long. Not that this would ever happen unless both players were trying...
About 6,300 if I'm figuring correctly. Every pawn would have to promote and every piece be captured only when necessary to continue the game.
Edit: 16 pawns * 6 moves each + 30 capturable pieces - 8 captures that would have to be made by pawns comes out to 5,900. A couple moves will also be lost when pawn moves and captures have to be switched back and forth between white and black but I don't really feel like figuring the rest of that out.
Cheers TadDude, that's exactly what I wanted to know - thanks for the link.
Till its over by time or someone checkmates their opponent.
Gee and I thought my 90-move draw was a long game!
What's the maximum number of moves a game can go on without one of the players being able to force the 50-move draw rule or a draw by repetition? The longest game on this site going on now is 166 moves.
No you're wrong.
Rich, I wrote that on 17th Dec 2008 at which point I was 100% correct. Now (Fri 20th March, 22:45 GMT) the longest game going on this site is 152 moves. The trick is to look at the date and time of the post at the top left hand side of the post.
the longest tournament game, as of a few years ago was 192 moves, to a draw, between two masters of relatively little fame
It could be mathematically solved. So if a piece is captured every 50th move and there is no sort of 3 fold, the game can be played till there are insufficient pieces left on the board. On chess.com even if there are two bishops or two knights on the board the game ends as a draw with insufficient piece vs timeout. Excluding the kings, there are 30 pieces on the board. Say if the last two pieces and 2 kings left on the board are either knights or bishops, then we can simply do 50x30=1500 as every 50 moves there is a piece captured and after 1500 moves the game should end as insufficient pieces draw.
I think this calculation is right. I'm sorry if there is a mistake if there is, please point it out so I can correct myself. If this theory is correct then the longest game possible is probably 1500 moves and obviously, this is highly unlikely to happen in a game unless intended.
What's the maximum number of moves a game can go on without one of the players being able to force the 50-move draw rule or a draw by repetition? The longest game on this site going on now is 166 moves.