"You didn't win correctly." - Chess (The original Dark Souls-themed tactical grid-based roguelike war game)

Stalemate rules mean that a player in a heavily disadvantaged position still has the opportunity to play for a draw, whether that comes from their own clever play or a mistake from their opponent (what happened in the comic).

Depends.

If the goal is to just play a game with a clear winner and loser, there's no benefit at all.

But that isn't what chess is. It's more like a strategy game where there are multiple outcomes that would reflect degrees of skill and thinking.

If you're already behind, but you can pull off a stalemate, that's hard. In some ways, it's harder than winning in the first place. It means that you and the other player are well matched. I've heard serious players rattle on about difficult draws the way football (both types) fans will talk about decisive victories of their favorite team. They'll pick the moves apart and use those moves and tactics in their own games.

I was never a serious chess player at all. I simply don't have the willingness to study it the way you have to to be really good at it. It felt too derivative for my preferences. But I can still remember more of my close games and draws than I can my wins because it took more of the kind of gameplay I enjoy, where you're kinda winging it and calculating based on your own way of thinking instead of relying on a body of research and theory.

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with that at all. The folks that play high level chess are amazing, and I fully respect the work they put into grokking chess at that level. I'm just saying that isn't fun for me, and I play board games of any type for fun and companionship, not personal improvement or a sense of competitiveness.

Which, going back, is why I can recall my draws better than my wins or losses. They were me having fun and managing to hang with smarter, better players by dint of sinking into the play of it.

But when one of those players pulls off a draw from disadvantage? That's fucking art, it's mastery of a complicated but finite set of possibilities.

It forces players to focus on the game no matter how much of an advantage they have.

In a competitive setting, it would mean that both players get 0.5 points instead of white getting 0 and black getting 1 points.

I don't know anything about chess but I imagine one benefit would be to give the losing player one last opportunity to avoid a loss by being strategic and give the winning player the need to still think about their moves instead of just randomly moving around since they know they will win otherwise.

In theory black could play poorly and give the queen away by placing it next to the white king, then if the white king takes the black queen it would be a draw. Why would black do such a thing? Well playing poorly also means stalemating your opponent in an obviously winning position, which also happened here.

You can argue it's an "obvious win", just like I could argue if I'm a piece up it's an "obvious win" for me. But just because it's obvious doesn't mean the result is guaranteed to happen.

Also I guarantee you not everyone can actually checkmate a king with just a queen and king. So in fact it's not so obvious for a super beginner.

As for the benefits of the actual mechanism itself, in some positions you can actually force a draw or stalemate where you'd either otherwise be losing, or you are unclear of your advantage. For example in one of my games I was chasing the King around with my Rook where if the king took my rook, it would be stalemate, and if they didn't take my rook I would keep checking the king (while making sure the distance between my rook and their king is 0).