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Schoolbook. 8x10 chess with the rook + knight and bishop + knight pieces added. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Oct 2, 2009 06:59 AM UTC:

I did another Schoolbook match, this time between ChessV and Fairy-Max. Since neither of those implements pondering, it was played with ponder off, at 15 min/game. Of the 52 games, 40 did run to completion, and 12 got stuck, leading to a forfeit on time. One of the games that got stuck was because ChassV promoted to Marshall, and Winboard did not understand M as a valid piece. This should be counted as a clear win for ChessV, as FairyMax was reduced to K+P and ChessV already had another Marshall. From the other 11 games 9 got stuck because of ChessV playing a free castling, refused by Fairy-Max. The remaining 2 got stuck because of Fairy-Max playing a Capablanca castling, and ChessV choking on it. (This seems to be a remaining ChessV bug; often but not always it dies when you input a perfctly valid castling.)

When a game gets stuck on a castling it is usually early in the game, and difficult to predict how the game would have ended. So if I discard those games for the moment, the match ended in a 29-12 victory for Fairy-Max. This result is similar to that of a blitz match (40 moves/min) between the two that I did earlier. The game quality is a bit lower than that of the Joker80-TJchess10x8 match, as both ChessV and Fairy-Max are pretty poor at King Safety. In general ChessV has much better positional play, (Fairy-Max really wrecking its own position with poor Pawn structure and development), but then suddenly gets outplayed tactically by Fairy-Max.

If I find a way to continue the unfinished games, I might put the PGN file on my website.

I still have to study your recent comments on the opening work; it all seems very interesting, but I haven't had the time yet to digest them.