Some (but slow) progress..

Well, my windoze64 expired, so i did an upgrade with a Vista OEM;
for the rest, updated my positional database again, with lots
of games analyzed (endnode values) with Rybka, now
more than 15 million positions. Full minimax again, and started some
finetuning/checks of the 'best' lines; then had to struggle quite a bit
with the Najdorf variation of the Sicilian.

First it appears that the variation with Bg5 was the best for white,
and i had to look a bit further to the complex poisoned pawn
variation. But in the end i went back to a more common variation,
namely with Be3, the English attack. With a plan of long castling
(after Qd2), it looks promising for white, but i have to play
much more games before i have a conclusive result.

Any other results ? Well not many, i'm starting to update my
main lines of the closed Ruy Lopez (in which i still managed
to keep a slight advantage , ie += for white), and then
have to plug them into my Arena book. Have played
some comp tournaments with the new Arena beta4,
which again looks much better, but unfortunately
it doesnt seem to play on the internet yet.

And still have to update my 'superchess' website,
coming year trying to switch it to my domain name
bookbuilder.nl, and maybe add some more fancy
stuff about opening theory and/or computer chess.

Last rating record ? Well with quite a big selfmade book now
with Arena (50M), almost the size of the 'Schnapps' book,
and the latest Rybka (using the lkmp64 version), i achieved
a new bullet record on ICC in March, namely 2994.
Latest records were from November last year (standard),
but i'll try to improve on that again coming months..
:)

Until later,
jef

Back to 1.e4..

First of all best wishes for the new year 2007 to you all.

Then a remark about the Bookbuilder site: unfortunately
the server superchess.com is not working at the moment,
but the site is still available at:
http://home.wxs.nl/~k.e.c/chess.html

Now some recent results:
having played some gambit lines in recent times with
my bookbuilder/rybka account on ICC, i now switched
back to the 1.e4 repertoire again. First of all, although
some gambit lines looked promising, in general the
results were not as good as i expected, eg. when
comparing with the nr 1 on FICS in standard,
Spike with a unorthodox/gambit book.
Secondly, having done some more analysis
on the Zaitsev line as described in my previous
message, i found out that with d4 (instead of
d3) in longer term still advantage with white
could be obtained, so my old 'philosophy' of
trying to obtain an advantage in all cases
for white with e4 seems possible again.

Ofcourse it still is a hypothesis, occasionally
some defence is encountered which leads
to drawish lines, but then i usually do
some more analysis and try to improve
the book. As a result the standard rating
on ICC is going up again. The Arena interface
is costing me some rating points when bugs
occur, but the opening book is getting better.

For black i'm certainly not ready yet, against
e4 , most often ..e5 is chosen, but against d4
it's not clear to me which defence is the 'best'.
Nimzo-Indian is ok when Nc3 is played,
but in other cases QGD or Slav may
be preferred above the Queens Indian which
i formally recommended.

In a few more weeks i expect to know more..