THE COMPUTER CHESS WORLD: How to make the most of chess software

Our catastrophic game ends. After a few brief words with the opponent, we rush to the hotel room, switch the laptop on, then the engine, and check the main mistakes. As our silicon counselor blurts out variations and evaluations, our tension slowly eases and we can finally claim we could have won: at one point, we had a clear advantage (+2.34).

This is actually pointless! If, instead, you think this is the right path towards chess greatness, please feel free to leave this book: it won’t help you.

Engines are truly the future of chess preparations: this volume will provide an overview of chess hardware and software to exploit all their potential.

We model a precise system to use engines, UIs, and databases at their fullest, as nowadays they are still rather abused.

This book will make the time you spend on chess software actually useful, optimized, and planned; analyses and searches, repertoires and trees, games and evaluations: they will be a puzzle to you no longer.

This book addresses the correct use of computer chess software.

Literature on chess software is still lacking, only comprising simplified manuals for trivial chess software, anecdotal selections, or, conversely, too technical works. Furthermore, computer chess experts and human players also worked separately on the subject, not only from different perspectives, but with different aims too, and without proper communication.

This book wants thus to be a first systematic and pragmatic work oriented to the different chess player types (over the board, correspondence, online), instructors, and even composers. How can they proficiently and effectively use chess software in practical contexts?

We will address the functional configuration of chess engines (strengths and weakness), the solid building of a professional chess opening book, and the efficient study of structures through chess database management systems, not to mention other useful applications.

While Augusto Caruso is a National Master, known chess editor and instructor, Andrea Manzo is an ICCF International Master and computer science engineer, known in the chess programming community for his work in adding Alexander Shashin’s theory to Stockfish (the currently top chess engine), which resulted in the creation of ShashChess, currently the top derivative of Stockfish; he is also the co-author of a self-learning search system for chess engines, which will also be explained in this book.

Our collaboration is meant to bring chess and computer science closer and to finally establish a best practice for readers to confidently use the full power of modern technology to improve their skill. Chess is a very complicated game: it requires complex systemic thinking, including the mastering of strategical guidelines and a profound judgment of how they can and must be violated. In this sense, chess software cannot fully replace a human chess instructor, which addresses the correct training, thinking methods, and psychological aspects (intuition, etc.), but it educates to concreteness, which is essential to validate human ideas.