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.