Category: Openings

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)

February 18, 2024 Matthew Sadler 31 comments

I was recently triggered to investigate (finally!) a new Leela feature called WDL Contempt. This feature was beautifully described in this blog article (The Lc0 v0.30.0 WDL rescale/contempt implementation – Leela Chess Zero (lczero.org)) by the Leela team, but the implementation is slightly fiddly so you need an hour of quiet time to set things up right.

January 26, 2024 Matthew Sadler 16 comments

I am pretty confident I have analysed more engine games than anyone else in the world, and I truly feel that my understanding of chess has benefited greatly from it. However, some aspects of engine play and evaluation are still difficult to grasp and internalise. I came across an instructive example of this while analysing a line of the Classical Pirc with 6…Nc6.

January 18, 2024 Matthew Sadler 8 comments

There are many difficult things about learning a new chess opening, but unresolved contradictions are perhaps the most painful. Unresolved contradictions typically arise in a student’s mind when opening courses praise a strategy in one chapter and then show it leading nowhere in another!