Evaluating the Evaluations

In the most recent post on my chess960 blog, CCC C960 Blitz Championship (October 2021), which was itself a crossover idea from this current blog, I ended the post saying,

Given that engines' evaluations for every move are available in the event's PGN game scores, perhaps there is something to be learned about the 960 different start positions. That investigation would make a good follow-up post.

My first problem was to learn how to find my way around the PGN files available from the TCEC and the CCC. I went back to TCEC Season 21 -- reported on this blog a few months ago in TCEC Stockfish Wins S21; CCC Romance Continues (August 2021) -- then downloaded the PGN file containing the 100 games played in the match and loaded it into a normal database, i.e. not a chess database. After an hour or two sorting out a few technical problems, I had a working tool for further exploration.

Of the 26 decisive games played in the S21 Stockfish - LCZero final match, only one was won by Black : game 85. The same opening with colors reversed, game 86, was drawn. All of the games in the match started with openings dictated by the organizers.

Games 85 & 86 used an opening called the English ultra-symmetrical variation, where the initial moves were 1.c4 c5 2.g3 g6 3.Bg2 Bg7 4.Nc3 Nc6 5.a3 e6 6.b4 Nxb4 7.axb4 cxb4 8.Nb5. The TCEC pages for the two games display the following charts showing both engines' evaluations during the course of the games.

In game 85, both engines calculated an advantage for Black that increased steadily. In game 86, the initial advantage for Black slowly evaporated.

I once based an entire post on detecting problems with the evaluations: TCEC Season 8 - Evaluation Anomalies (December 2015). It took me as long to identify those anomalies as it did to create the database for the current post.

Now that I have a tool for rapidly evaluating the engine evaluations, what can I do with it? The first task will be to put it to work on the 960 start positions used in chess960.

Carlsen's TMER 2019-21, Lichess

For the past few months I've been working on an update to my page on Magnus Carlsen's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER; 2000-) Last week's post, Carlsen's TMER 2019-21, the Tours (October 2021), looked at two series of online events:-

Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour (2020), and
Meltwater Champions Chess Tour (2021)

A day later, on my chess960 blog, I looked at GM Carlsen's Online Chess960 (October 2021). It turned out that all of those games were played on Lichess. While I was looking at the chess960 events, I discovered that Carlsen has played thousands of games using the traditional start position, most of them bullet, on the Lichess server. I'll use this current post to take a second look.

The following chart shows Lichess events that are recorded on the TMER. The first entry ('LiChess Meetup') was already added on the previous update to the TMER; the other entries are currently marked 'In preparation'.

The two events dated 2020-09 were organized by the St.Louis chess club, as was the 2020-06 Clutch Chess International (uschesschamps.com). Announcements for the two Katara events can be found at:-

• 2020-08-21: Announcing the Katara International Bullet Tournament with World Champion Magnus Carlsen (lichess.org), and
• 2021-06-12: Announcing the Katara Bullet Championship 2021 with World Champion Magnus Carlsen (ditto)

As for the four events dated 2021-02/-04, they appear to have been picked up randomly by TWIC. A few years earlier we find the first two 'Titled Arena' events, both played by Carlsen under names other than 'DrNykterstein':-

• 2017-12-15: Magnus Carlsen wins the first Lichess Titled Arena
• 2018-01-19 Pseudonymous Magnus Carlsen Wins 2nd Titled Arena

Later we find Carlsen playing under yet another name. Earlier this year someone calculated a tentative count of his tournament wins:-

• 2021-02-23: Alireza wins a 13th Titled Arena • 'GM Alireza Firouzja won his 13th Titled Arena on Saturday, bringing him almost even with the record 14 won by GM Magnus Carlsen. (NB: Upon further review, it seems Magnus has actually won 15 Titled Arenas.)'

Since Carlsen also played a few such events which he didn't win, it would take some effort to locate all of the 'Titled Arena' events he played. Given that they were bullet tournaments lasting only a few hours, I could probably just summarize them for now; idem for the bullet matches.

Yahoos at the Grand Swiss

Another month, another 100 stories added to the expanding collection of Yahoos. Last month we had The Yahoo Database Reveals a Lawsuit (September 2021). This month we have the news sources shown in the following chart.

The sources follow the usual pattern. Chess.com dominates, followed by six sources with two or more stories each, mostly chess sites, leaving 36 sources with a single story. CNN, already seen in Speculative Yahoos (June 2021), is arguably the most mainstream of the multi-story sources. Two of its three stories were the sort of feature story that might pop up on any source in a random month:-

• 2021-10-01: How do you become a chess grandmaster? Magnus Carlsen is here to tell you (cnn.com)
• 2021-10-04: Tani Adewumi: How chess changed the fortunes of 11-year-old prodigy and his family (ditto)

The third CNN story was recent news related to a high-level World Championship qualifying event:-

• 2021-10-23: Chess players withdraw from Grand Swiss amid Latvia Covid-19 lockdown (ditto)

Undoubtedly the story of the month, it was echoed in corresponding stories from chess news sites, including Chess.com's Peter Doggers:-

• 2021-10-22: FIDE Chess.com Grand Swiss Proceeds With Exemption As Latvia Locks Down (chess.com)

Hiding among all of the other sources was a living, breathing Yahoo:-

• 2021-10-21: Asian Americans dominate 2021 US Chess Championships, Wesley So joins Bobby Fischer in successive-win club (yahoo.com) • 'The 2021 U.S. Chess Championship winners are Asian Americans Grandmaster Wesley So and International Master Carissa Yip.'

The story was originally from Nextshark.com. The site's About NextShark page says,

NextShark is a leading source covering Asian and Asian American news including business, culture, entertainment, politics, tech and lifestyle.

Following the story about the recent U.S. championships were links to four other stories from Nextshark.com, all about violence against Asian-Americans in different settings. Will chess tournaments become the next target?

[Yahoos (mainstream news stories about chess) are derived from Google News top-100 (or so) stories from the past month.]

TCEC Cup 9, CCC C960 Blitz Final : Both Underway

Every two weeks I look at the world's two major engine-vs-engine competitions, which just run and run and run some more. The title of the previous report, TCEC Testing Cup 9; CCC C960 Blitz Semifinal (October 2021), tells most of the story at that time. Let's add a few more details to the summary of that report:-

TCEC: The site is currently performing 'Cup 9 Testing'. I expect the tournament will be well underway by my next report in two weeks. Since the TCEC cup events proceed quickly, it might even be finished. • CCC: In the 'Chess960 Blitz Championship', Stockfish, Dragon, and Lc0 finished 1-2-3. Three more engines also qualified into the 'Chess960 Blitz Semifinals'.

Jumping ahead two weeks, here is the current status.

TCEC: The site's 'Cup 9' has reached the semifinal round, with Stockfish, ScorpioNN, KomodoDragon, and LCZero all qualifying for that stage. The Stockfish - ScorpioNN semifinal match started with a long sequence of draws. It's possible, even likely, that a single game will determine the winner.

CCC: In the 'Chess960 Blitz Semifinals', Stockfish finished a point ahead of Dragon as both engines qualified for the final match. Only one game of their 40-game minimatch was decisive, with Stockfish winning. Lc0 lost three games to each of the two engines, winning none. The other three engines were far behind. In the final match, Stockfish has a non-trivial lead over Dragon. Less than ten games have been decisive after hundreds of games played.

[For further information from the various stakeholders in the engine-to-engine events, see the tab 'TCEC/CCC Links' at the top of this page. • NB: Leela = LC0 = LCzero; Dragon = KomodoDragon]

The Sociology of OTB Chess

Whenever I feature a video in this series on The Sociology of Chess (November 2016, approaching its 5th anniversary), which is most times, I try to pick a video that appeared no earlier than a month ago. I'll make an exception here, because it's a two part video and I only became aware of it after the second part was published.

All About Over-the-Board Chess | A Grandmaster's Guide (31:58) • '[Published on] Jun 15, 2021'

The 'Grandmaster' in the title of the video is GM Daniel Naroditsky. The description says,

In this video, I take you through the process of starting your foray into over-the-board chess. I demystify commonly confusing topics such as how to find your local chess club, how to register for a tournament, and how to find a comprehensive listing of tournaments. This is not an exhaustive video, but I hope that it clears up some of the confusion associated with over-the-board chess!

For easy access, here are links to the Youtube pages for both videos:-

• All About Over-the-Board Chess | A Grandmaster's Guide (Part 1; June 2021)
• A Grandmaster's Guide to Over-the-Board Chess | Etiquette and Behavior (Part 2; September 2021)

The description of the second part says,

In this second part of my OTB guide, I take you through the process of playing your first over-the-board tournament. I talk about how to find your board, what a tournament looks like, and I cover all aspects of over-the-board etiquette, including how to make moves, touch-move rules, how to offer draws and resign, how to settle disputes, and much, much more!

Part 1 currently has close to 200 comments; part 2 close to 500. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that GM Naroditsky has combed through those comments looking for material that will go into part 3. What a great initiative by the multi-talented GM! (He's also a columnist for Chess Life.)

Carlsen's TMER 2019-21, the Tours

The entire content of last week's post, Carlsen's TMER 2019-21, 'Online = Y' (October 2021), was its own summary:-

After adding the face-to-face (aka offline, aka OTB) events to [the Carlsen TMER], I tackled the online events. The results are documented in the second TMER section titled 'In preparation'.

'The Carlsen TMER' refers to Magnus Carlsen's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (2000-). For this current post, I returned to Carlsen's Prelim Events 2019-21 (August 2021), where I started to explore two series of events: the 'Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour', and the 'Meltwater Champions Chess Tour'. For basic info about the results of individual events, I discovered that Chessgames.com had the most compact, albeit detailed pages. Following are links to individual pages for each event.

Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour

• Magnus Carlsen Invitational (2020)
• Lindores Abbey Rapid Challenge (2020)
• Chessable Masters (2020)
• Legends of Chess (2020)
• Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour Finals (2020)

Meltwater Champions Chess Tour

• Skilling Open (2020)
• Airthings Masters (2020/21)
• Opera Euro Rapid (2021)
• Magnus Carlsen Invitational (2021)
• New In Chess Classic (2021)
• FTX Crypto Cup (2021)
• Goldmoney Asian Rapid (2021)
• [...]

The following image shows the section of the TMER that covers the first tour (individual events are coded 'MC-CT').

GM Carlsen's 'Result' for each event (5th column) is indicated, but his 'Score' (6th) is missing. Although it doesn't make much sense to enter overall WLD totals for a sequence of knockout matches, especially where the games were played at varying time controls, something should be present in those fields.

CCC Changes the Guard

Back in the middle of the summer, in a fortnightly status post on the two main engine competitions, TCEC S21 Sufi Underway; CCC Still Romancing (August 2021), I observed,

The [CCC] site is seeking additional help; see 'CCC Looking for New Server Admin and Developer!' (chess.com). More info, including a job spec and application, is available via the site's Discord platform.

The Discord announcement, signed 'ChessErik' and dated July 2021, pointed to Computer Chess Admin (Developer, Engine Master for CCC) (docs.google.com), which started,

Love computers and chess engines? Chess.com is looking for someone to take over the management of the Computer Chess Championship [CCC] server administration.

The key requirements on that Google Forms page, which has since been marked '>>> Role Has Been Filled <<<', are shown in the following image.

The job spec pointed to two other Chess.com admin pages. The first was How Chess.com's 100-Person Virtual Team Works Together (chess.com; signed 'erik'), a living document. When it originally appeared in August 2017, it announced, 'This month we finally hit 100 team members', but an update dated January 2021, corrected that to:-

We hit 100 team members in 2017. At the start of 2021 we have 250+ team members, and it still feels like a close family!].

The second Chess.com admin page was About Chess.com (first published September 2010, updated frequently). It starts,

Chess.com is #1 in online chess... But who are we? Where did Chess.com come from? Where are we going? • The Beginning: Chess.com started in 2005 when two friends -- Jay and Erik (that's me!) -- decided the world needed a better chess website. We met 10 years earlier in college, where I first became addicted to chess — and Jay was the chess club president. We became friends through our shared passion for the game. [...]

The 'About' page lists Chess.com staff, including the 'CCC Tournament Director; Since August 2021'. I couldn't find an announcement about who was hired for the position, so I'll stop here.