Against Stockfish: Game #16: I am back!

Before we get into the post...

A Disaster!

In my previous two posts, I told you that I was playing in a FIDE-rated classical tournament. As you may have already guessed, it was a disaster. I tried to use my method, but I was too unsure of myself. I was too scared of losing. This was never a problem against Stockfish. Because when playing against Stockfish, you don't expect a human to win. But when playing a lower-rated player, there's this anxiety and the fear of losing that you have to cope with. And I tried to cope with it using a lot of calculations, which cost me a lot of time. But even after those calculations, I would still play a bad move because I was too afraid that my evaluations would be wrong and I would either miss a chance for my opponent or me. Fear of losing is what brought me down in this tournament. So I ask you to never be afraid of losing because he who is afraid of losing or getting neglected, or made fun of, never reaches their absolute true potential. I was afraid of losing. And this is never an advantage. It's something to overcome. Never let fear back you down, and I am talking with experience. Now let's get back to the post.

The Game

I was able to hold this game because of two reasons. The first one is that I knew the opening theory very well. I am in the process of building a complete repertoire for the English opening. For now, it's a private study, but I will make it public as soon as I finish my work.
The second reason why I was able to hold this game is that after I got a slightly advantageous position after playing 12 moves of theory, it played into a draw knowing that it had a worse position. Learning my lesson from Game 09, I settled for a draw. But the main reason for drawing the game was that I thought it would be good if I had a positive result for my returning game.

Continuation of the Super Eval saga:
Game #09 Analysis:

Lessons from this game:
> Theory is important
> Know the situation before committing to something

During a meditation session, I thought of how I could improve the Super Eval. And I found a way. And the way I found is what I call the Rule of Ratios. But to use it, some changes had to be made to the Super Eval. The main change I made was that, after taking in the situational conditions, you first decide if the position is Dynamic or Static. Then you either switch to MCTS, or you make a plan related to the verbal evaluation. After making a plan, you think of the candidate moves that help you to accomplish what you planned. To decide between the candidate moves, you use the Rule of Ratios. Read the relevant sections of the Super Eval explanation to learn more.

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. For this blog series, I will only be explaining how to cope with the board situation.

Dynamic or Static?

This decision is not that difficult to make. The theory is, that if there are tactical weaknesses in the position (Hanging pieces, King Safety, Alignments) then the position is dynamic. If the position doesn't have any tactical weaknesses, then the position is static. If the moves that exploit the tactical weaknesses in a dynamic position do not work, then it's also a static position.
Now that we've decided between a dynamic and static position, let's look at each one of them.

Dynamic

If the position is dynamic, you have to switch to the MCTS. The description of the MCTS can be found at the bottom of the article. But if you realize that the moves exploiting the tactical weaknesses do not work (i.e. do not give you a better position after using the MCTS), then you have to consider it to be a static position.

Static

If the position is static, then you have to make a plan related to your verbal evaluation. More than anything else, this requires knowledge and experience. I won't be discussing how to make a plan in this article because there are plenty of other books and articles that teach you how to make a plan. Once you do have a plan, you have to get a list of candidate moves that could help you accomplish your plan. After you get a list of the moves, you have to select one of them. This is where the Rule of Ratios comes in.

Rule of Ratios

What this means is that to select a move from your list of candidate moves, you evaluate the Effect: Drawback ratio of the above moves. And you play the moves that have the highest effect-to-drawback ratio (with the effect side being higher). To evaluate the effect and the drawback of a move, you have to evaluate the Attack: Defence ratio of your effect or drawback. For drawback, this means how much attack from the opponent is there compared to your defense of the drawback. For effect, this means how good is your attack/effect compared to the opponent's defence against the entity you are having the attack/effect against. Again, this method is artistic. It's not entirely theoretical. So if you are going to use this method, perfecting it with knowledge and experience is your duty. Now I'll give you the method you have to use in dynamic positions.

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/
All my tournament opponents for teaching me how important it is to not be afraid of losing. And remember, I'll be back...