The white queen goes to g6, which looks like the most natural move on the board, and the game is instantly drawn. White has a queen. Black has a king on h8 and nothing else. Half a point each.
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I have watched a nine-year-old do this after twenty minutes of good, patient technique, and there is no way to soften it: the point is gone and it is not coming back.
Not in check is the whole of it
Article 5.2.1 of the FIDE Laws: the game is drawn when the player to move has no legal move and their king is not in check. It ends the game there, without a claim, without an arbiter, without either player agreeing to anything.
Two conditions, and both have to hold. No legal move means no move by any piece, not just the king, so a side with pawns that can still push is not stalemated. Not in check is the half that beginners drop. In the diagram above, put the white queen on g7 instead of g6 and the same three squares are covered, but now the king is attacked as well, and the position is checkmate rather than a draw. One square, one whole point.
The kindest way to think about it: chess never lets you sit still. If it is your turn you must move, so a position where you cannot is not a loss, it is a breakdown, and the Laws call it off.
It is not only a bare king thing
The queen ending is where beginners meet stalemate, so people assume it needs an almost empty board. It does not. Any king with no squares and no other movable piece will do, and there are three shapes it keeps taking: a king shut in a corner by a queen one square too close, a king pinned to the edge by a rook with nowhere sideways to go, and a pawn on the seventh rank with the defending king sitting in front of it.
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6 Nothing is pinned, nothing is trapped, and Black is not being mated. His pawns simply cannot move because White’s pawns are directly in front of them, and his king has run out of squares. White, a knight and a pawn to the good, has drawn. The move that did it was the pawn stepping from h5 to h6, taking g7 away; one move earlier Black could still play Kg7, or take the pawn with gxh5. Locked pawn chains are exactly where this happens, which is why pawn endgames are worth practising even though they look like the boring part.
The best swindle in chess
The same rule that ruins won games saves lost ones. When you are dead lost, stop looking for a way to win the position and start counting your own legal moves. If the answer is nearly zero, there may be a draw sitting in front of you.
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2 h 1 That is the mad rook, and every strong player has one of these in their scorebook. White is not doing anything clever with it. He is getting rid of it, because the rook is his last mobile piece and the pawn on h2 has been dead since Black played h3. Notice that Black cannot decline: Kxh7 is the only legal move on the board.
Two lessons out of one position. When you are winning, leave your opponent a square, and check first, count later. When you are losing, count your own moves before you resign. There is a whole page on the swindle as a skill, and it is not a dishonourable one.
Stalemate needs no claim, no agreement and no arbiter. The position appears and the game is over, exactly the way checkmate is over, and Article 5.2.1 does that without either player saying a word.
Not every draw works like that. Threefold repetition and the fifty-move rule are claims under Article 9, and if neither player claims one, the game simply carries on. So when you have stalemated your way out of a lost position you already have the half point in your pocket; there is nothing to argue and nobody to convince. The other ways a game is drawn are worth knowing for exactly this reason, because they do not all behave the same.
Before you move, count squares
Count the enemy king’s legal moves before every quiet move, and when the answer is about to hit zero, give check or give him a square: the cure is worked through position by position on how to avoid stalemate.