The Sultan and his Harem vs. The Crusader's Army

This is probably a forced win for the crusader if he has the first move (f2 needs to be protected by playing Nf3).

The problem is that the queens are too valuable. If white plays it right, they can not exchange themself against the white pieces. So white can slowly advance his pawns, supported by his pieces and black can not do much against. The eval around -10 in the start position is therefore wrong.

Example game played by me against engine (with loots of undos for me):



The Harem can only win if the queens manage to get behind whites pawns. That strategy is comparable to that of black in Horde.

This is a good piece placement training.

If you are able to win this with white with less than three undos against strongest computers you can consider yourself a positional pro.

A comparable setup where black has nine rooks instead of five queens - which is approximately the same material (Rook = 5 pawns, queen = 9 pawns) - is won for the harem. An exchange sac will open files for black to break through. For example:

With 4 queens, Stockfish :
info depth 35 seldepth 62 multipv 1 score cp 710 nodes 32819321305 pv g1f3 c8g4 d2d3 d8b6 b1c3 f8c5 d3d4 c5e7 d1d3 g8g6 e2e4 e7b4 a2a3 g6e4 d3e4 g4e4 e1d1 e4d4 f3d4 b4d4 f1d3 d4g4 f2f3 g4g2 h1e1 e8d8 c1e3 b6f6 d1c1 f6h4 e3b6 d8c8 e1g1 g2g1 b6g1 h4e1 c3d1 e1g1 a3a4 g1h2 d3e4 h2h6 c1b1 h6h1 b1a2 c8b8

When I ran several games, with Stockfish playing both sides, black (the harem) won every time. White always had the first move. The games were all different. In the shortest game, there was mate in 16 moves. One of them took over 40 moves.

Seven knights against three queens is probably a draw:

@MitchellTimin

Games which engines play against each other are in general a weak proof, because this is behind the horizon of the engine. There are positions where only one or only a few moves win, and when the engine sees none of these moves it can not win it. That does not mean that the position is not won. Do not overestimate the engines, they still do not understand some very irregular types of positions - they rock in 95% of regular positions.

Also, i believe that this position which you gave, or a relatively similar one, has once been discussed in the chess.com forums and strong players (i think pfren) confirmed that the white side is probably a win.

We need some average or better human players to play it against each other. I think the harem has the advantage, but I would not expect it to win every time.

@MitchellTimin your thinking is wrong.

Stockfish isn't tuned for this kind of positions. Having no non-queens to do captures of defended pieces is unusual, having multiple queens is unusual. The material value of the queens is greatly overestimated in that position.

I disagree. For example, Stockfish prevents the quick mate, and generally makes good moves. I would like to show you one of the games, but I don't know how to do that.