an accumulation of small advantages that get resolved in endgames. Chess engines remain relatively weak in endgames, while that’s my strength.
For a strong player unfamiliar with international play, what is required? I don’t know if the international aspect changes anything. If one is a strong player, then one should just play to one’s strengths. That said, it’s always impor- tant to play the board and not the opponent. One should always attempt to play that which is deemed correct, regardless if that causes one to leave their primary skill sets.
Using a computer is more than just letting the engine choose a move. Can you elaborate? What are your guidelines? I don’t know how others use their chess engines. But, I tend to lead mine into positions that I want to investigate. After all, chess engines will examine all moves that are not pruned away by software heuristics. But humans know which lines are worthy of exploration and which are not. In some tactically rich positions I allow the engine to guide me because it’s a far superior tactician. But I still am dubious of the engine’s evaluations and instead only use my own. But in other positions, it’s sometimes best not to use the engine at all, other than to blunder check. That’s because some positions are too difficult for chess engines to add value in. For example, closed positions with hypermodern strategies (e.g. Clas- sical King’s Indians) often cause engines to play weakly. And their evaluations, which always favor White, are unreli- able and incorrect. That said, top-level correspondence
chess is not about who has the best com- puter hardware/software. If that were true, then the man with the biggest, bad- dest machine(s) would dominate. But many chess engine fanatics with the fastest octal hardware and best programs fare poorly in serious correspondence chess. Most of my games in the past were played on a slow, old computer.
Are there any (competent) internationalists left who do not use a computer to gener- ate moves? If there are, I don’t know of them. That said, I think that most strong players know from experience when to use their engine(s) and when to use it less, if at all. One of the best ways to understand engine strengths and weaknesses is to play engine matches and tournaments at very long time controls. For example, I play mine at 30 moves in 31
⁄2 hours,
repeating. Unfortunately, many days are required before the competition ends. But if one is already a strong human player, one can examine the output of
uschess.org Stephen Ham with his wife Tao in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China.
the various engines in postmortem analy- sis (with engine assistance) to see where engine evaluations are correct and when they’re clueless. That said, there are many relatively simple endgame positions that engines, even with endgame tablebases, claim are wins when the reality is they are forced draws. So, one can learn that engine X is relatively strong in specific positions while engine Y seems better in others. And one can see when they’re
weak and when their evaluations are accurate or not. This can be helpful when entering those types of positions in cor- respondence chess.
Is there any popular over-the-board (OTB) opening that is bad at correspondence? Conversely, are there any openings bad at OTB play that are quite playable at CC? I have some very strong opinions on open- ings that are basically flawed but would
Chess Life — August 2011 37
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