Russell Sherwood

Russell Sherwood  Saturday, February 29, 2020

Excluding the Swedish match we have commenced 33 Friendly matches to date.

29 of these have been completed. Our results have been interesting......I utilise two methods to score matches. The first of these is the simple board score and in the regard we have:

Won 9

Drawn 3

Lost 17

Not too encouraging, although when ratings are taken into account the situation is somewhat different. Here I use an expected score based upon the average rating difference in each game. On this basis our results have been :

Won 17

Draw 0

Lost 12

What is even more interesting is that 6 of these losses were in our first 8 games, giving us a 15-0-6 since mid 2014. 

Why is this? Much has been down to the WCCF attitude to Friendly matches - that they are a training and development event. Almost all of our senior players "earned their spurs" in Friendly events.

So our current 4 events

Wales - Italy 25-55 

Here we gave away 120 rating points on average, so the result was always likely to a formality. Congratulations to the 6 players who recorded wins!

Wales - Germany 15.5-25.5

Many games still to play but we suffered on the lower boards here

Wales - USA 11.5-12.5

A close match! The bottom boards have set up the team well, can the Top boards bring it home?

Wales - Czech Republic 6-11

Closer than it seems with a number of "postmen" on the middle boards!

Russell Sherwood  Saturday, January 25, 2020

The Euro Team Cup has commenced! This new event is intended to extend on the familiar friendly format and provide something akin to a Davis cup format for CC.

The initial round has generated a number of interesting match-ups:

Russia - France

The Russian Team have an edge (2413 v 2371) average rating with French only matching on the Top 5 Boards.

Prediction: Russia 23 - France 17

Italy - Ukraine

The Italians have the edge here (2434-2371 average rating), again with Ukraine only matching on the Top 5 Boards

Prediction:  Italy 22.5 - Ukraine 17.5

Spain- Poland

Evenly matched in terms of rating (2326 v 2303), however this looks to be a little misleading when individual match ups where Spain appear to have the edge.

Prediction: Spain 22- Poland 18

Netherlands - Romania

The Romanians appear have an edge both in terms of average rating but this becomes much more complex on lower boards.

Prediction : Romania 22 - Netherlands 18

Next time a review of the Germany - Norway - Slovenia match and the Big one, Wales - Sweden!

Russell Sherwood  Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Upon reading the good news on John Clardige picking up his SIM Title I started to ponder the number of "major" (IM, SIM, and GM) titles Welsh players have secured in recent years. Furthermore from this I the started to look at how we compare to other Federations.....

So since 2014 we have secured 7 major titles, which puts us joint 20th on the list - interestingly almost all of the Federations above us had many more players. So at this point looked at the number of major titles earned as a % of the number of players that Federation have on the current rating list.  At this point things start to get very interesing.....

If we utilise the scatter chart we can see that the average is 5.4% - that is to say that for every 100 players on the rating list 5.4 titles are achieved. For viewing ease I have removed all Federations with less than 25 players.

So.......of the Big 4 Germay and Russia are significantly above the mean, USA and England significantly below - this deviation means that a Russian player is over 7 times more likely than an English one to gain a major title!

Of the next  of  Medium sized Federations, only France is above the mean.......

Moving into the smaller grouping we see a large number of smaller Federatons well above the mean, with Belarus being the "champions" at 18%!

This  rapidly leads to Why?  A few ideas....

1) The higher scoring Federations tend to be more focused on International rather than National events.

2) Access to suitable events - it is worth noting that only South Africa (which was a suprise) falls above the mean of Federations outside of the Eurozone

3) Player Development programmes - ranging from formal training camps to more informal methods such as event promotion,

4) Teamworking methods - methods utilised by some, seen as against the rules by others, until the recent clarification.

Here ends my examination of this data but for me shows vindication of the methods the WCCF have used over the lasy few year but also give me some homework to dig deeper in the secret sauce of the 11 Federations above us on this list!

Russell Sherwood  Tuesday, September 24, 2019

The Italian Federation produce a very attractive annual yearbook.  In this years edition we have a few nice photos of some of our players

Download

Russell Sherwood  Sunday, August 11, 2019

In recent times the use of the term "Gaslighting" has increased significantly, mirrored in Film and TV. For those not familiar for the term a common definition is "manipulate (someone) by psychological means into doubting their own sanity.".

Now, In CC, I have never had players have me doubt my own sanity (although some of the characters I have both played and crossed path within an administrative capacity have brought me close!)

So from a CC perspective, a slightly different definition can apply "manipulate a player into doubting their own analysis". 

Few players can claim not to be guilty of this in its most mild form - offering a draw in an inferior position, especially when the higher-rated player.

In a more unpleasant form, we have all played those individuals who keep offering draws and get upset when you don't accept the draw.

A more much more modern tactic that the discerning player should be aware of can be seen when utilising ChessBase.. Imagine the following scenario. You are significantly ahead in a game. Your engine is showing move X as preferable to a decent depth. Chessbase shows a different move to a much greater depth with a good score. 

Now upon examination, this move is generally poor and turns your winning position to a draw. What the opponent has done is lay a trail to attempt to have the player doubt their own analysis. (In the example I reviewed it was clear it was the opponent due to the dates on the analysis).

So the moral of the story is whilst the analysis on Chessbase (and all crowd-sourced websites) can be valuable, always make sure (especially when it is "fresh") that someone is not trying to lead you down the garden path

Russell Sherwood  Sunday, August 4, 2019

I often get asked about where to obtain some of the Engines I write about.....so to make life easier i have collated them into a folder in the link at the bottom of this article. I will update on occasion, so don't expect the absolute lastest version a day after its release!

Commercial Engines will not be in this folder.

Included

AsmFish10

BrainLearn

BrainstomFish

CFish Extended

CIChess

CorChess

Eman

Honey Xpro

Komodo 10

McCain

MZFish

Raubfisch -SL

Raubfisch 

Sugar NN

ThothFish

ShashChess

No warranty or guarantees - use at your own risk!

Link

Russell Sherwood  Friday, April 12, 2019

"Success leaves clues......" - Brad Thor

A couple of years ago I produced a list of players with rapidly growing ratings - even a cursory examination can give clues and a close examination can give significant insights which can be used to aid advancement. Over the next couple of months, I will publish some in-depth reviews of specific players but for now, the list below identifies the "hot prospects". What is new that some are new to CC but others are established players who improved

Russell Sherwood  Sunday, March 31, 2019

This I write this feeling probably the best I have done for around a month – it's quite a strange virus that removes almost all energy and motivation and gives mild flu symptoms which last for weeks. Even more so when it affects more than one person! I can tell you its not fun when is coincides with a surge at work as well!

 Still, time to crack on and clear all the backlog!

Anyway back to Correspondence Chess. The last few months have generated quite a few interesting developments with regard to CC and Engines. These developments are, I believe, quite positive as well as having the potential to be quite disruptive to use Marketing speak.

I believe most people will have heard of Alpha-Zero and the advances this has delivered. This is covered in the excellent book “Game Changer” (In an in-depth review from a CC perspective will follow in April – let me clear the backlog first!).

Whilst AZ is very interesting and as I will cover next month, gives a number of insights very useful to the CC player, it is in itself not going to have a direct impact on CC for a number of years, it at all – why: because until the software and hardware become readily available it will not be within the realms of the ordinary CC player.

So discounting AZ, what is changing that is going to disrupt CC? If we consider a year or two ago the situation was, in a nut-shell a choice of Stockfish, Houdini or Komodo, with Stockfish the choice of the majority and the main difference between players being a combination of Hardware, Engine-wrangling skills and Chess knowledge, pessimistically probably in that order.

However, the situation has changed over the last year…..

• LCZero: The development of the AZ inspired open-source engine and crowd-powered Networks has been truly amazing, with LCZero now being on par with Stockfish in typical engine tests.
• Komodo MCTS: Whilst not as strong as Stockish, the Komodo teams efforts to bring an effective Monte-Carlo Tree Search to an AB engine have generated an excellent tool for the CC player.
• Monte Carlo Tree Search: For many years the AB engine has ruled the roost (and still does in very rapid time controls) but the use of MCTS has flourished in the last year giving a previously unseen level of variety in move possibilities
• New Engines such as Ethereal
• Stockfish derivatives: A number of developments have taken place over the last year which are of interest to the CC player. Examples of this are:
  • The excellent Raubfisch , which continues to tweak its results upwards
  • Stockfish Cluster – an attempt to allow the running on massive hardware
  • ShashChess – A very interesting offshoot which adapts itself based on the type of position.
  • Sugar MCTS – a powerful implementation utilising a version of MCTS but also including a learning function.
  • Thothfish – a very new kid on the block but bringing two new very interesting features of a “Magic Tactic Solver” and more interestingly a way to manipulate analysis to swap or not swap certain pieces.

• 7 Piece TB: These are now coming available for download. In reality, I don’t see anyone downloading the full set, due to speed and memory limitations but the downloading of specific ones can aid enormously.

Putting this together (and other advances I have not mentioned) we are now seeing a situation develop where there is more than “one horse in town” in the form of Stockfish, where these different approaches all have very similar performance in traditional testing (The flaws in this for CC I will cover another day!) but often give different suggestions in the same position.

The outcome of this is two-fold: Human input will become more important, the decision to take path A instead of path B, C or D and that this will lead to a reduction of the draw rate or rather more hard-fought draws at a minimum!

So a positive picture for CC? I believe so.

Anyway back to the backlog clearance, then onto launching EARG, writing the Engine and Introduction to CC Guidebooks!

Russell Sherwood  Monday, March 18, 2019

With the latest Norm being achieved today, it was interesting to note that the WCCF series of Invitational events has now generated 62 Title Norms.

Not bad for one of the youngest members of the ICCF Family!

Russell Sherwood  Sunday, March 3, 2019

Provisional List for 2019/2 - Very positive signs with only 4 falling ratings of players rated above 2000.