Hence the original 4.5 points komi about 100 years ago. The half point is the part that turns a draw into a win for white, that starts playing after black. But it's not strictly necessary: we could state in the rules that white wins draws.

Black started playing less conservatively and komi was soon adjusted to 5.5 points. It became 6.5 points at the turn of the century. It's 7.5 with Chinese and area rules.

This variant of chess seems to me potentially unfair to the player that gets a bad starting position, one that loses most games or that could even be winning but only with a narrow and difficult path to find. It could work in a tournament if all players have to play all the initial configurations. In thnk

But Chess960's castling mechanism is totally unintuitive. So, Chess 744 was born. The exact mechanic (rook moves to king and king swings behind it) from standard chess is used and all of chess 960's setups that had a rook and the king in a corner were removed. This website goes into detail. There is no better method, IMHO, of creating an intuitive chess variation that addresses this issue. It is very hard and unintuitive in Chess 960 to remember where to move your pieces to castle and whether or not it is even legal given the squares the king has to move through.

https://sites.google.com/view/chess-744/todays-744-game

Even on 9x9, like look at GoQuest for example, they must have thousands of game a day at 7 komi and ~nobody complains if there's a jigo, it just means the game was really close.

In chess the problem is just high level play has _so_ very many draws, so it can be worth trying to reduce that.

In go you get a draw once in a while. In chess you get a draw by default and have to really work to avoid it (assuming you're at a level vastly vastly higher than I am).

And then have either an imbalance in allowed time for each player or have them bid on it.