cool

why computer chess is cool;
well that's simple, it's always different;
you can compile Craftty with DevC++,
update your repertoire with Bookbuilder,
and basically, just have fun.

In the meantime, in my repertoire my
ICS accounts have gone back to the Tarrasch
in the French, personally i'm still busy
trying to get a (C) account on FICS
(for my Djenghis account now all sanctions
already have been removed) and
still busy trying 'solving' chess, i.e.
trying to find a better opening repertoire..

Nope, not will succeed in my lifetime
but it's not impossible Nah, maybe
coz of the 50 move Fide endgame rule.
Let's say a knight is blocking a pawn.
And there are some more pieces.
Mate in 135. Bad luck for black.
Ah well, lets talk about that later
:)

opening repertoire, a little update

well after some more numbercrunching, my opening
repertoire/strategy has changed a bit for black;
not for white, i still believe in 1.e4 !

For myself, being a lousy Otb player, i just play
..e5 with black against e4. And against d4, well,
the Bogo-Indian might be a bit easier than
the Queens Indian. Advantage of the latter is
keeping the bishop pair in the endgame, but
muddling yourself through the middlegame
is a bit difficult, as usually a complicated positional
struggle, involving dominance in the center,
pawn advances, etc. are quite common.

For computers: well, against e4 i don't hesitate
to recommend the Sicilian, but because of the
Rossolimo (B5 against Nc6) i now recommend the
Najdorf; yep, very complicated, but a comp can do it.
And most GM's as well. And having looked at
some recent Linares games (2005) as well as
some more analysis, instead of the agressive
moves Bc4 and f4 against the Najdorf, the more
quiet Be2 or Be3 now seem a bit better imho.

And against d4? Well i need to improve my
queens indian book; comps are not so good in positional
play, so with Arena (www.playwitharena.com) i also
choose to defend with the Bogo (named after Boguljyobov)
sometimes; even although it sometimes is costing a bishop.

Yet after a while probably the Queens Indian is more solid.
And Kings Indian ?
Nope, don't like it.
While i can't refute it, as it leads to some unbalanced endgames,
it doesn't seem to be rock solid to me, in a fundamental sense.
Same with the Gruenfeld.

Until next time,
Jef

engines and correspondence chess

ever wondered what the best program, aka 'engine' is
for correspondence chess ? Well with Chessbase engines
like Fritz 8, Shredder, Junior etc. it is possible to use
a correspondence mode, and let your comp krunch
the whole knight about a variant.

But what is it doing then ? Well, after a certain number
of moves, it simply continues, and makes a tree
for a number of subvariants (which you can choose
in the options). Now ideally such a tree would
be backsolved according to an alfa-beta algorithm,
whereby transpositions also are taken into account.

Is the Chessbase program doing that ?
No sir, it's not !

A whole big tree is calculated for all kinds of
variants, which can contain many transpositions,
and then a complete minimax is done. This
means *lots* of inferior variants are calculated into
much more depth than necessary; a waste of time !!

No, probably with an engine as DeepShredder, and a
powerful multiprocessor machine would be more
useful for the postal chess player, just by going
to the variants manually, scrolling back and
forth through the variants, and letting the hash
tables 'remember' the results (i.e. evaluation).

Still at higher levels it might help to have some
knowledge about endgame strategy, to find
the best lines during the middlegame.
Engines probably are just an aid, just like
a GM as J.Piket most likely recently has been
for the brandnew world champ correspondence
chess Van Oosterom.. ( a patzer anyway, as
he usually is opening with 1.d4?!).