my latest books
"Re-Engineering the Chess Classics"
Nominated for the 2023 Chess.com Book of the Year
"The Silicon Road to Chess Improvement"
"Game Changer" won the ECF Book of the Year 2019 and the FIDE Book of the Year 2019
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
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
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)
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.
"The secret of my success: with every move I force the opponent to think for themselves!"
- Alexander Alekhine
about
I am a Chess Grandmaster and writer, and one of England's top players. When I am not doing my job as an IT Consultant, I fill my free time with as much chess as possible
my work
Writing and discussing chess has always been one of my passions. I review chess books in a regular column for New in Chess magazine and have written 8 books myself. I also contribute to chess videos regularly.
contact me
I hope that you enjoy the site. I will enrich its content over time and would love to hear what you think. Let me know whether there are any topics you would like me to cover in my blog.
"How many moves do I consider when analysing? Only one, but it's always the best one!"
- Emanuel Lasker
