Expressions of Interest, Freestyle Tournament No 2

[Aaron Guthrie]

Are we allowed to announce "mate in x", like they did in the old days?

[Garvinator]

Are we allowed to announce "mate in x", like they did in the old days?

Ok, that clarifies matters. I wasnt sure if you had tablebases and if so, how far ahead

[Kevin Bonham]

Congratulats to Mangafranga.

[Aaron Guthrie]

Indeed, yay for me!

And yay to garvin for running it!

[Aaron Guthrie]

Some thoughts on the tournament. Regarding the forfeiting on time that happened, I wasn't very impressed. I don't understand why it happened, there were a bunch of ways to avoid it.

1)secure the option of taking time off before the tournament began (I considered this, but decided to take another route).
2)Prepare moves ahead of time. This is what I did when essay time came around. To get 3 weeks off all I needed was to prepare 3 moves ahead.
3)Just make a quick choice of move, like you do in OTB time trouble (so about 1-2 minutes per game per week)
4)Ask during the tournament, but before one's time ran out for extra time (this would take all of 1 minute, and could cover all games)

Now, regarding how to play good freestyle, aside from the issues with strength of players and computers. I think a great thing to do is to be aware that one can get into a rhythm with the computer that can be harmful. So what I am thinking of here is just that you and the computer will end up only having certain ideas about the position, and can miss obvious things. And since the computer has different ideas to you, and gives you good reason to believe it (e.g. top 4 moves are +1, next best is 0.00, so you just stick to the top 4), this can give you assurance that you are covering everything, whereas in fact you are not.

So to combat this I suggest occasionally seeing what other engines think, if you have them, or other players. In one instance I showed the position I had against Kevin in the game where I was Black. After Bxh6 I showed the position to Scott. The computer and I thought Kevin was going to play 18.d4. Scott suggested he might just be trying to nick a pawn. When I had a look at this it didn't look as bad as I, and the computer, originally thought. Thus I played Qxf8 which works better against dc4 than my original plan of Kxf8 would have.

I also checked amongst my engines to see if any liked dc4. Only one did, fritz 7. Now from memory I already knew that Kevin has at least had once had Fritz 6. But from now on I occasionally checked with fritz 7 to see what ideas it had for the position. I didn't do this beforehand since I did not realize the large difference's engines have.

[Garvinator]

I am certainly interested in running another freestyle tournament, with starting to get entries in a couple of weeks or so.

[Aaron Guthrie]

I am certainly interested in running another freestyle tournament, with starting to get entries in a couple of weeks or so.

I'll be taking a pass on this one.