Against Stockfish: Game #15: The New Fish is too Slippery

Important!
From now on, the games will be played on a new platform called chessui.com. This platform provides access to a stronger version of Stockfish so I can lose more games and learn more stuff!
By the way, for those of you who are interested in the tournament I mentioned in my previous post, it's not finished yet, I just found some free time.
Now let's get back to the post...

Continuation of the Super Eval saga:
Game #08 Analysis:

Lessons from this game:
> Have more grip on the game because fish are too slippery.
> Attacking suits you even though it may not be the best strategy against computers.
> Continue to play on chessui.com

This was a nice defensive game by Stockfish against what was supposed to be a crushing attack. Learning to defend like this would take years of practice. But I am up for it. Although the article schedule might be a bit scattered because of my tournament, I will continue to deliver content for all of you who are interested whenever I have some free time. Now as always, I will give you the strategy descriptions.

Super Eval

Super Eval is a system in which you take in the situational conditions, process them to make a verbal evaluation, and choose the move that best suits your evaluation. Let's go through the steps one by one.

Situational Conditions

Situational Conditions in a tournament game can be divided into 3 main categories. They are:
1. Board Situation - Comparison of No. of Hanging pieces, King Safety, Alignments, Material, Controlled Squares, Mobility, and Pawn Structure
2. Clock Situation - Comparison of Time available per move
3. Psychological Situation - Comparison of Tournament pressure, Spectator pressure, Rating anxiety
Evaluating the situational conditions correctly requires a lot of experience. This is more of an artistic approach to chess rather than a theoretical approach.

Verbal Evaluation

We now make a verbal evaluation of the position based on the situational conditions. Basically what's happening here is that instead of saying white is better by +1.05 after this, this, that, and that so white should be ahead by +1.05 in this position, we use features of the current position to describe why white is better by +1.05. We don't need an exact evaluation like +1.05, we just need to get a rough idea about who's better in the current position based on the previously mentioned situational factors. So a normal verbal evaluation might look like this:

"White has two hanging pieces while black only has only one. But the black king is severely weakened and having the move here really benefits the white side. White has a lot more mobility than black but a slightly weakened structure. Overall, I think white should be a little bit better"

Move Selection

Now that we've got the verbal evaluation, it's time to choose a move. More than anything else, this requires a lot of knowledge and experience. This knowledge should be gained by analyzing chess games and reading annotations. Let's go back to our example verbal evaluation.

"White has two hanging pieces while black only has one. But the black king is severely weakened and having the move here really benefits the white side. White has a lot more mobility than black but a slightly weakened structure. Overall, I think white should be a little bit better"

In a position of this type, we can give points to the moves according to how well they satisfy the following requirements:
> Moves that defend your hanging pieces.
> Moves that control the squares near the opponent's king.
> Moves that check the opponent's king.
> Moves that restrict the opponent's pieces.

After you've selected the most likely best move by ranking the moves according to the satisfaction of positional requirements, you have to evaluate the complexity of the position. This evaluation differs from one person to another. But the thing is, when you identify the position as complex, you have to switch to the Monte Carlo Tree Search. This is the same strategy that I recommend for the endgame. This strategy is as follows:

Monte Carlo Tree Search

> First, we take a list of candidate moves and see which moves are most preferred by our intuition.
> Then we make a play-out (a.k.a roll-out) by applying the same principle from our opponent's side and mark the evaluation when a static position is reached.
> Then we take the average of the so-found leaf positions to assign a value to the calculated candidate move.
> Then we repeat the process for all the candidate moves and compare the move values to come to a final conclusion.

When using this method, it's important to broaden your list of candidate moves rather than going deeply into one line. Going deeply into one line can make you miss simple moves available for your opponent that would give them the advantage. In doing so, you also run the risk of missing moves that would have simply granted you a better position. This was well proven in the game Glance at everything. In situations where you don't have enough time to glance at everything, just glancing at the intuitional moves is acceptable.

This is how I am going to go forward. Beating Stockfish would sure be a difficult task, especially after switching to chessui.com. But I believe that it's not impossible. Playing these games and writing articles on them is exhausting. But I have improved a lot through this series. So I guess it's worth it. I hope this series is instructive to all the readers and don't forget to share your thoughts in the forum!

External links

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@felew699 (No videos yet. I am still working on it)
Twitter: https://x.com/felew699
Chess.com: https://www.chess.com/member/felew699
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/Felew699/
Against Stockfish: https://lichess.org/study/2guM490P
Opening Study: https://lichess.org/study/xeTeuu3A

Special Thanks to...

Grammar Editor: https://app.grammarly.com/

P.S. - Don't forget the context challenge, "This looks threatening, but not for a calculating monster like Stockfish!" (what is the book and who is the author?)