Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: The importance of opening books -- a simple experiment

Author: Vasik Rajlich

Date: 07:58:18 02/27/05

Go up one level in this thread


On February 26, 2005 at 19:00:19, Peter Berger wrote:

>On February 24, 2005 at 04:58:05, Vasik Rajlich wrote:
>
>>Certainly you can get this by choosing drawn positions. :)
>
>Very good one :)  I think there is more to it but the burden of proof is on my
>side now I assume.
>
>> The one opening disaster was against one of the amateurs,
>>where Crafty's pieces all ended on the back rank and the king was just toasted
>>right in the opening - although Crafty won this game IIRC.
>>
>
>Thanks for the reminder - so there is only 24 positions left to find. The
>position out of book was quite OK IMO, but it was very bad for Crafty.
>
>The Falcon game maybe is interesting anyway, because it shows _relevance_ of
>book, though positive influence remains to be shown.

Just keep in mind that you haveto pick the positions before you see how the rest
of the game turns out. I think we can agree that there is no limit to how much
an opening book is worth if you know exactly what will happen :)

Actually in this case you'd pick .. Bd6 because Crafty is well-suited to
defending against the particular king attack which it will provoked there. :)

>
>The Sjeng-Crafty game of round 2 had a strong influence on opening choices of
>opponents, because they realized that Crafty was ready and willing to discuss
>the Berlin endgame. No one was interested. A bit unfortunate, as with only about
>a month of preparation time for the event and two weeks of full-time work, the
>major effort ( as with every opening repertoire) had to go to the black side of
>1. e4, and it would have been fun to see more tests of the core.
>
> What's funny about the Falcon-Crafty game is that both sides were afraid of
>exactly the same thing , because of the tournament situation that called for a
>win - the opponent heading for a draw. The Falcon team chose the four knights to
>avoid the Berlin endgame ( they thought was meant to be a draw weapon, sth I
>would not agree to) while I avoided 4. ..Nd4 to the four knights I expected for
>the very same reason. Due to limitted preparation time, the four knights didn't
>get too much attention in advance, so the alternatives were playing 4...Nd4
>without special preparation that potentially can lead to a quick draw or to play
>the allround response 4...Bd6 , that I had studied a little, put into the books
>and liked personally , but hadn't played as much as a single testgame with
>Crafty. It's a fine line IMHO, but Crafty hated the bishop on d6 so much that it
>couldn't think of anything else than getting rid of it ASAP - LOL . But it was a
>horrible line to choose for Crafty, no doubt.
>

Yes - you see this quite a bit - the opening book is finished, and the engine
wants to reposition some of the pieces. It seems that often the engines will get
away with it.

One thing I agree with - the Berlin is not at all drawish - at least when
Kramnik is not involved ... :)

Vas

>Peter



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.