Lichess

Cheating in Chess? Deal with it!

~ acepoint

tl;dr: There is cheating in chess. Talk about it, deal with it, but have a sophisticated, stringent game plan before the party starts!

Disclaimer: For nearly 20 years I worked as an IT professional. I play club-level Chess, my highest Elo was close to 2200. I dealt with cheating issues while organizing local and regional Chess tournaments online during Corona. Around 15 years ago I was engaged in developing a cheating detection system for Backgammon hosted by a big game server. I don’t claim that I played Backgammon world-class level. But at least I reached the semifinal twice in the world championship and knew a little bit about how to fiddle around with checkers and cube.

Weiterlesen →

Dirty Harry strikes again

~ acepoint

In the sixth round of our online town championship I won my first – and a thrilling – game with the black pieces. Again I played on a DGT board connected to the server with DGT Live Chess on my Apple M1.

In the opening I chose the Dirty Harry Sicilian, a nice surprise weapon not only in blitz or rapid games. Perhaps it’s also playable in «over the board» tournament games at our level. I won’t tell you too much about the lines here. The repertoire was developed by «ChessExplained» Christof Sielecki. The theory and the interesting story behind its birth is available at chessable.com.

Weiterlesen →

Tools for PGN files

~ acepoint

Two Three tools for extracting information and/or manipulating large pgn files. Especially pgn-extract did impress me. From lichess I downloaded a file (213 GB!) for later training a NN. It took close to 12h on a single CPU but I was able to extract around 5 GB of games, filtering time control between 900 and 3600 seconds plus dividing the files into the ECO codes A – E.

(Update:) Someone asked for the uci-analyser, here you go:

Weiterlesen →