Thoughts about traning games against engines

If you want to play engine games for training and improvement, there are different thoughts about this.

- Play the strongest engine you have.

- Play a strong engine with reduced strength.

- Play a strong engine which automatically adapts it's strength to you strength, like Fritz friend mode or Shredder Classics 5.

- Play a weak engine, and when you get stronger, choose a stronger engine.

Regardless what option you choose, I think it's important to make analysis of the game afterwards. In this process I think you should use the help of the strongest engine you have. (A good coach would be better).

Any thought about this?

If you play a strong engine a lot, you'll get in the habit of not checking whether the opponent's move is a mistake, and you'll never get practice pushing for a win from a winning position.

If you play an engine you can sore roughly 50% against, it's still not ideal. Engines are typically bad at strategic moves, and engines that are forced to play far below their level will make strange tactical mistakes too. Humans opponents intuitively know what makes a position hard for a human, and will put up tougher (or at least a different type) of resistance.

If you play an engine that's weaker than you... that makes no sense to me. Unless you're just killing time or something.

Having said all that, I think playing an engine has its uses. For example some players are lazy tactically, or have the bad habit of playing for simple tricks. If they play an engine, they'll be forced to back up their moves with a lot of calculation, and will never play for simple tricks, so for them playing an engine can help strengthen certain skills and/or form useful habits.

I played against a lot of computers through the years. I got good against them. People play differently... You don't see desperation in lost positions with a computer. When i started playing here I got a rude awaking that I could wipe the floor with a '1400' engine, but routinely lost to a 900 human when they went into YOLO aggression mode.

Since then, I've improved against humans a lot, but conversely my training has only slightly gained against computers.

Actually I was doing some training myself where I played vs an engine.

I was trying to streamline my calculation process (which was a mess) so I needed an opponent who didn't mind if I started and stopped games, and was waaaay better at calculation than me.

I played some games where I wrote down (on paper) a few lines and evals for every move. That helped me see things I was and wasn't checking, and whether I was calculating things over and over unnecessarily.

I think that generally you learn most by playing against an opponent  a bit stronger than you. Therefore you should train against an engine with a reduced level. Unfortunaly in my experience  even nowadays they aren't able to emulate an human player. For example I have an older shredder engine which when adjusted to club level makes 10 perfect moves in a row and then a big tactical blunder. It's ridiculous, no human would play in such a way .

I was hoping that they had improved in this relation. For example if you play a stock sacrifice they would defend decently but would miss some deep computer defence. But after trying the reduced level of the engine of this site I think the engines still fail miserably to emulate human players. In my opinion the developer should spend more time to improve in this relation instead of improving the strength of the engines which is of no use for the average club player.

I would be gateful if somebody knows an engine which excels in emulating human players of different levels and would tell so in this blog.

Chest master series (grandmaster edition is latest) is the best chess engine for training. (best selling chest program).

1. Extremely variable playing styles( with personalities), more than 50 types , I think

2. Lessons and tutorials and master games collections etc.

You might want to check out Noctie, it's a new chess engine that emulates human play at levels from beginner to master + has some unique training features like instant feedback after every move

As long as MatchMaking has players, I don't see any reason why to play against engines. Definitely engines don't behave the same as players. For I always feel that weak engines may play weirdly sometimes, because the engine is already knowing the best move but it's playing a different one.

In example, in shooter games. The bots are always intentionally missing their shoots. Because what's an easier for a computer to just shot at you. So games probably do some randomization factors.

In chess, weak players forget sometimes their queen or don't notice the attacker.. How will the engine decide when to ignore (or acting like if they forget) the attacker? Extremely unhumanly.