Category: Openings

April 2, 2024 Matthew Sadler 4 comments

Leela’s wonderful new WDL Contempt feature – discussed in earlier posts and also in a series of videos on my Silicon Road YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxhvNMc95Uo9N6W48TUAyIwkjK0w1wHKj&si=IK9OpgsfWB-wktZ1) – continues to inspire new avenues of chess investigation. One event that created a stir was the fascinating David Navara – Leela match at knight odds on which I commentated here: https://www.youtube.com/live/b04MPlCSL24?si=ybsivb7HM3HnosEa I’ll most likely dedicate some blog space to that match in the future, but this blog post focuses on a lovely little programming project by grizzled veteran TCEC chatter mrbdzz who many of you will know from my streams as “Leela’s Greatest Fan”!

March 20, 2024 Matthew Sadler 7 comments

When I started playing again after a break of some 8-9 years, my opening choices were driven by a fervent desire to do something different to what I had done before, and by some strange feelings of nostalgia.

March 14, 2024 Matthew Sadler 4 comments

A little while back, I published some blog articles and some videos on Dragon’s creative 5.Qd2!? idea in the Pirc (https://matthewsadler.me.uk/openings/a-stunning-dragon-idea-against-the-pirc-5-qd2/ and https://youtu.be/DuFfJwBgMD8 to start you off!) A lively Twitter discussion followed with Ali Mortazavi (English IM) and Peter Heine Nielsen (GM and of course Magnus Carlsen’s second) that moved on to debate the relative merits of the Pirc

February 28, 2024 Matthew Sadler 4 comments

n this post, I continue my adventures with Crazy Leela’s Grob Semi-Slav! After being rather marmelised when taking the gambit pawn, I decided to refuse the offered pawn in a couple of games. Let‘s see how that went! A video of these games is available from my Silicon Road YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/EK9_iA63Nvo while engine analysis of these games is available from the usual place: http://cloudserver.chessbase.com/MTIyMTYx/replay.html

February 22, 2024 Matthew Sadler 4 comments

In a previous post, I described how to set up the new Leela feature called WDL Contempt (described here by the Leela team: The Lc0 v0.30.0 WDL rescale/contempt implementation – Leela Chess Zero (lczero.org)) In this post I look at one of the opening discoveries I made using a Leela optimised to search for promising lines against a prospective (fictitious!) opponent rated 400 ELO points below me! (A roughly 2700 ELO vs 2300 ELO scenario)