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Posted by Matthew Sadler on 20th March 2024

The Modern with …c6 and …d5

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.

Posted by Matthew Sadler on 14th March 2024

Which is better? The Modern or the Pirc?

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

Posted by Matthew Sadler on 28th February 2024

Getting Leela to analyse and play in the style you want! Part 3 – More adventures in Crazy Leela’s GROB Semi Slav?!?!

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

Posted by Matthew Sadler on 22nd February 2024

Getting Leela to analyse and play in the style you want! Part 2 – Introducing Crazy Leela’s GROB Semi Slav?!?!

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)

Posted by Matthew Sadler on 18th February 2024

Getting Leela to analyse and play in the style you want! Part 1 – Setting up WDL Contempt

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.