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 …

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 …

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/

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”!

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.