May 26, 2025
Matthew Sadler
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This blog post continues my slight obsession with the intricacies of the …c4 move in a Trompovsky / Torre Attack structure. This time we focus on one of the engine’s best lines for Black: 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 d5 3.Nd2 Nbd7 4.Ngf3 h6 5.Bh4 e6 6.e3 c5 7.Bd3 Be7 8.c3 0–0 9.0–0 and now instead of…
May 23, 2025
Matthew Sadler
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How much should you understand and how much should you know? It’s the eternal question of opening preparation! Ideally, you should understand everything and thus need to know nothing. Unfortunately, you need to know something before you can understand. So you first need to know, then understand, and then you should forget what you know…
May 18, 2025
Matthew Sadler
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While indulging myself in some analysis of games by the legendary Italian grandmaster Sergio Mariotti, I came across an extraordinary positional episode in some engine games I ran as part of my analysis. It’s one of those engine recommendations that make you question everything you thought you knew, as well as awakening feelings of guilt…
March 16, 2025
Matthew Sadler
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As followers of my YouTube channel will know, I have been experimenting with a number of chess variants studied by Google DeepMind (together with ex-World Champion Vladimir Kramnik) in their interesting paper “Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess”. This paper can be viewed at https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04374 I’ve put together a playlist…
April 2, 2024
Matthew Sadler
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Lichess was the host for a fascinating match on Saturday 30th March between GM David Navara and Leela Zero at knight odds chess. I had the privilege of commentating on the match and the complete recording is available here on my Silicon Road YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/live/b04MPlCSL24 All the games of the match are available here on the Lichess Events page: https://lichess.org/broadcast/leela-vs-gm-david-navara-knight-odds-match/match/U8CvXKoW#boards The Leela team blog article on the match is here: https://lczero.org/blog/2024/03/leela-vs-gm-david-navara/