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/ This match was another arti ..read more

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 programmi ..read more

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. My frequent choice of 1.e4 a6 2.d4 h6   and various 1…b6 systems were driven by fond memories of my English junior days and the games of Basman and Speelman! Another favorite choice was the Modern with …c6 and …d5 Position after 1.e4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 3.Nc3 c6!? …which I plucked from my memories of the games of two English grandmasters with huge personalities: David Norwood and Julian H ..read more

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 Position after 1. e4 d6 2. d4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6 and the Modern Position after 1. e4 g6 2. d4 Bg7 3. Nc3 d6 Both felt that the Pirc was clearly inferior to the ..read more

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) Obviously, you can get Leela to search from move 1 but my opening repertoire – even now – still stretches a bit deeper than that! So I decided my fictitious op ..read more

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 idea of WDL Contempt is that you tell Leela “Look I’m playing White against an opponent rated 400 ELO lower than me. Can you suggest some ideas in the opening to maximise my winning chances against such an opponent?” During analysis, Leela ..read more

Just a few days ago, I was pointed to a new scientific paper by Google DeepMind https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.04494.pdf by a Reddit thread – thanks very much!(https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1alx0t0/google_deepmind_presents_grandmasterlevel_chess/  It’s amazing as it’s from Google DeepMind, it’s about chess, but it’s not about AlphaZero! The Google DeepMind researchers were trying to build a “searchless” chess engine: an engine that doesn’t calculate at all but finds great moves by “understanding” the position through evaluation only. They cite a quote they attributed to Jose Raul C ..read more

Garry won the 1996 match against Deep Blue by 4-2, though not without losing the first game. The 1997 match was thus eagerly awaited: what had / could Deep Blue learn from the first match and how much would it have improved? I’ll start releasing the videos about this wonderful match on the Silicon Road YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconRoadChess) from Saturday 10th @19:00 GMT! Murray Campbell – co-creator of Deep Blue – described in detail the changes that were made to the 1996 Deep Blue in one of his scientific papers (“Deep Blue” (Murray Campbell, A.Joseph Hoane Jr, Feng-hsiun ..read more

The idea for a series of videos on the Garry Kasparov against Deep Blue matches of 1996 and 1997 came from a subscriber to my YouTube channel. I thought it was a great idea and I’ve become a bit obsessed with it! The videos are on my Silicon Road YouTube channel which is here: https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconRoadChess in a special Playlist called “Deep Blue Rediscovered” and the videos will be coming out over the next few weeks, starting with the 1996 match.  The first two videos of the 1996 match are already available here https://youtu.be/GIV1E783EK0 and https://youtu.be/i2PRgmgOQ4s I’v ..read more

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. While analysing lines from Viktor Moskalenko’s latest New in Chess book “The Perfect Pirc-Modern” I noted that after 1.e4 d6 2.d4 Nf6 3.Nc3 g6 4.Nf3 Bg7 5.Be2 0-0 6.0-0 (Karpov’s classical handling of the white side) Nc6!? 7.d5 Posit ..read more