You're way off the mark here on modern engine strength.
There are many examples of top players playing Leela Knight Odds. And none of them even got remotely close to a decent record. Usually a few draws, and maybe a win. But almost entirely losses.
And that is with knight odds. Without that, zero chance.
If you're betting against modern stockfish, respectively, that's a terrible bet.
There are some games of knight odds Leela playing superGM's.
For example, Hikaru Nakamura went 1 win, 2 draws, and 13 losses against LeelaKnightOdds at 3 minutes + 2 sec increment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYO9w3tQU4Q
So that's a score of 2 out of 16. Which is apparently actually very good. I know Fabi played a lot of games too, and also lost almost all of them.
And that is with knight odds lol. And stockfish is ever better than Leela, but generally less aggressive and more methodical.
You clarified in another post that you had won back in 2015. I have no clue the strength of engines back then (I imagine still very strong of course), but a decade of growth is a lot. They're completely insane nowadays.
I think that pretty much ruins the whole point of Fischer Random. The point is to not be able to open prep at all, and have to deal with a wide variety of opening possibilities. Too many to reasonable predict and prepare for past the first few moves.
With being able to place your own pieces, you can much easily dictate your opening beforehand. And I have little to no doubt top players would converge towards certain optimal placements. And then you'd be back to playing the same positions over and over, just like standard chess. Which is what Fischer Random attempts to stray from.
Also, on a more subjective note, quite the crazy opinion to call this format "boring". I haven't looked at these games yet, but the 2022 World Championship had some absolute crazy games. With crazy openings and positions that you just never get in standard chess.
Yeah his claim is quite absurd really. If it was a weaker stockfish (bad hardware, older version etc.) then maybe. Modern stockfish pretty much crushes any and everyone. A draw alone would be extremely impressive, and maybe doable with enough luck from a top player. But even that is very far fetched nowadays. Let alone actually winning.
Elsewhere in the thread he revealed that he achieved these results around the year 2015, which means we was playing against Stockfish 6 or earlier, estimated to have about 400 less ELO than today's Stockfish 18. Stockfish 6 didn't even have NNUE, so the real issue seems to be that he thinks his results from 2015 hold any relevance to the chess engines of today.
No not at all! You can find plenty of videos on YouTube of humans taking down 2015-era stockfish. Usually it involves exploiting specific weaknesses in the engine, for example bringing the game to a stalled position where the game nearly reaches the 50 move rule, and then the engine makes a disadvantaged move to avoid a draw.
Especially pre-NNUE, chess engines were often not fully well-rounded, and therefore a human with specific knowledge of the chess engine's weaknesses could take it down with enough attempts.
That formation is pretty close to the standard position though. Just swaps a Queen and Rook. It puts the Queen in the corner, a less aggressive position with less options to develop.
I've only played a little 960, but these queen in the corner positions seem to often lead into more closed positions.
Yeah, agree, but in the setup you mentioned, 1.b3 and 1. b4 are both strong moves, because it basically forces the game to develop kingside from the get-go.
Seems the opening can get really sharp, or basically a race to bunker via 1.Nf3
I can't say for 960 specifically, but for standard chess getting rid of castling usually results in the players just manually castling their kings. I believe that is why the move was introduced in the first place. So it really doesn't accomplish much except make the opening a bit more limited, since they have to leave themselves a way to manually run the king over one of the rooks. Usually to the short side, since that's quicker. Basically makes queen side much less viable to leave the king at. And queen side castling was already the rarer of the two options.
I imagine it would be a similar story for a lot of 960 positions. I'm not sure how getting rid of castling would benefit anything. In 960 you already get a lot of super crazy aggressive positions with exposed kings even with castling.
> I can't say for 960 specifically, but for standard chess getting rid of castling usually results in the players just manually castling their kings.
The entire design of 960 is backwards when it comes to castling, because it was deliberately designed to facilitate castling. This is the whole reason there are "only" 960 positions, as opposed to 2880 positions if our only restriction is that bishops are on the opposite color (and that both sides are symmetric). By reifying castling as something that must exist rather than a gross and unfortunate hack to paper over the flaws of the standard chess position, the ruleset puts the cart before horse.
I've been using Claude and Codex and both are excellent; I imagine Gemini would be too. Likely Grok as well. They're all smart enough to be helpful at this point.
There are many examples of top players playing Leela Knight Odds. And none of them even got remotely close to a decent record. Usually a few draws, and maybe a win. But almost entirely losses.
And that is with knight odds. Without that, zero chance.
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